2012: To Be Inside Someone Else’s Dream: Music for Sleeping and Waking Minds

Abstract

Music for Sleeping and Waking Minds (2011–2012) is a new, overnight work in which four performers fall asleep while wearing custom designed EEG sensors which monitor their brainwave activity. The data gathered from the EEG sensors is applied in real time to different audio and image signal processing functions, resulting in continuously evolving multi-channel sound environment and visual projection. This material serves as an audiovisual description of the individual and collective neurophysiological state of the ensemble. Audiences are invited to experience the work in different states of attention: while alert and asleep, resting and awakening.

Appendices

Author Commentary: New Musical Intimacies

Gascia Ouzounian, R. Benjamin Knapp, Eric Lyon

Ouzounian: Music for Sleeping and Waking Minds (2010–12) was the second in a series of overnight works—or, more precisely, music for sleeping audiences—that I have been developing in collaboration with different artists, musicians and engineers since 2009. The first, EDEN EDEN EDEN (2009), was created with the filmmaker Chloé Griffin, and entailed a continuously evolving, six-and-a-half-hour composition for string ensemble and film. It was performed overnight, starting around midnight, and audiences could experience the work while awake and while asleep.

Music for Sleeping and Waking Minds emerged from my ongoing collaboration with the Biomuse Trio, an ensemble that explores the use of physiological sensors in the context of musical performance and composition (Lyon et al. 2014; Ouzounian 2012). It involved four sleeping performers who, while wearing head-mounted EEG sensors, generate an audiovisual environment composed of 8-channel sound and visual projections that correspond to sleep staging. Again, audiences were invited to spend the night, and could experience this work in multiple states of attention, including sleeping and dreaming. However, in this instance, the performers’ only task was to fall asleep and awaken as they normally would.

More recently, I have collaborated with Christopher Haworth and Julian Stein to create Long for this World (2013–15), an interactive, software-based work that allows listeners to create their own music for sleeping (Ouzounian et al. 2015). Long for this World was substantially different from the other compositions in that listeners could experience it at their leisure, in the comfort of their own homes, and could determine, to a much larger degree, the musical content of the work.

These compositions for sleeping audiences are intended to pose questions that bear much further reflection, and to cultivate musical experiences that we may not normally encounter in either concert listening or in listening to recorded music. How do we experience sound in different states of attention, like sleeping and awakening, and how do these experiences affect us differently? How do we communicate with one another, as performers, if we are not fully conscious? What do these communications tell us about ourselves, and about what we conceive communication to be, or, for that matter, what we believe music to be? How do we experience our environment, including our immediate aural and social environments, within collective modes of sleeping? If we create our own music for sleeping, what is it that we want this music to ‘do’ for us, and how can we translate these motivations into musical ideas? Must concert listening always involve focused or attentive listening, the kind of listening that music theory presumes, or is that kind of listening simply a route towards analysis? How would music be different if it was composed for everyday life activities like sleeping, and not necessarily as ‘an accompaniment’ to those activities, but as an integral part of those activities themselves?

Knapp: The limited notion of the DMI was challenged in this work. Since this paper, a more abstract relation between physical state and sound is now accepted as a complement to the notion of the precise physiological DMI. State of consciousness, emotional state, and physical position can all be incorporated in the relationship between performer and music.

Lyon: It seems to me that there is a special aspect of intimacy to Music for Sleeping and Waking Minds. On the surface, the sleepers’ performance is involuntary in its particulars. They simply relax and go to sleep; the active musical construction of the octophonic sound that the audience hears is created by a combination of head-mounted sensors, brainwave pattern recognition, and spatial sonification algorithms. And yet the method of data capture from brainwaves provides a sense of intimacy, as if the listener is inside an overlapping dreamscape constructed by four people who have withdrawn from the direct experience of reality. This special sense of performance intimacy seems to me a unique attribute of this composition.

In a more recent piece by two of the authors, a different but powerful form of performance intimacy was observed. Dualities, composed by Eric Lyon, is scored for cello, Biomuse, and ensemble. The piece was premiered by the Crash Ensemble at Virginia Tech in 2015, with Kate Ellis on cello, and Ben Knapp performing Biomuse. Although the two soloists were spatially separated on stage, their performance interactions were understood by several audience members to be tightly integrated and intimate, with a profound level of musical communication. These two examples suggest that in NIME-based performances, an audience’s perception of intimacy is a key element to a successful performance.

Expert Commentary: To Sleep, Perchance To Dream

Sile O’Modhrain

In Music for Sleeping and Waking Minds, Ouzounian et al. present us with a consummate example of a novel interaction paradigm for the realization of musical intent. The intent is to create a shared space of experience, at once intimate and vulnerable, where performers simply fall asleep in the company of an audience. Patterns arising from the cyclical brain-wave activity of the sleepers are used as control signals for both visual and musical elements of the work. Musically, the piece is comprised of octaphonic drones whose pitches are allocated across the distributed array of sensors so that changes in the activity of individual performer’s brainwaves subtly affect the progression of the music while not disturbing the drone-like quality of the evolving sound. The drone, in turn, lulls the audience toward sleep so that they, too, are drawn into this intimate vulnerable space.

For over 30 years, Ben Knapp, in conjunction with other collaborators, has worked to design body-worn sensing systems for capturing biometric signals. He has also played a pivotal role in defining a new field around the concept of biocontrol for musical applications. In Biomuse (Knapp and Lusted 1990), he brought to the community the first robust platform for tracking heartrate, galvanic skin response and brainwave activity that could be used in a real-time performance environment for the control of sound. In 2008, he joined forces with Eric Lyon and Gascia Ouzounian to form the Biomuse Trio. The trio has developed a performance practice that integrates traditional classical performance, laptop processing of sound and the transduction of bio-signals for the control of musical gesture. The work of the ensemble encompasses hardware design, audio signal processing, bio-signal processing, composition, improvisation and gesture choreography (Ortiz 2012). In 2005, Knapp and Cook introduced the concept of Integral Music Control, a technique for assessing the composite gestures and emotional state of a group of performers, audience members, or both (Knapp and Cook 2005). Knapp says:

When I first started doing this research, I was interested in exploring the language of physiological and emotional interface design for musical, artistic or therapeutic applications. My first questions were about the tensions between sonification and musicalization. ...With the concept of the integral music controller and my more recent work in mobile environments, I am more specifically interested in the larger picture questions of emotional connection and empathy (Ouzounian 2012).

Beyond its integrity as a composition, the contributions of Music for Sleeping and Waking Minds are both the technical infrastructure that makes the work possible, and the questions that it raises about the shared role that performers and audiences play in creating musical experience. “When I conceived the composition,” Ouzounian said

I was actually thinking about it as a kind of ensemble communication between the performers, but in different states of attention and consciousness (Ouzounian 2015).

In drawing upon the evolving patterns of sleep, the authors create this space for shared subconscious experience. In doing so, they provide a compelling demonstration of the potential for Knapp and Cook’s technique for Integral Musical Control (Knapp and Cook 2005). More importantly, this piece provides a timely compositional critique of the all-too-familiar focus on “interface” as the means of communicating conscious performative intent.