Music is perhaps the most accessible and emotional form of art, while the brain is one of the most complex and fascinating organs in the human body. New York based documentary filmmaker Elisa da Prato (who’s family are from Barga – she is the grand-daughter of the painter Carlo da Prato ) has teamed up with philosopher Dan Lloyd to investigate the connection between the two.
To fund their film “Music of the Hemispheres” they’ve put the project up on Kickstarter, and have currently raised just $3,788 of their $16,000 goal with just a week left to go.
In the film, da Prato and Lloyd will investigate modes of data visualization, music composition, performance, and audition. These systems will be “cracked open” and compared to the examination of brain mechanics and the architecture of mind.
Part diagram and part portrait, part love story and part instruction manual – Music of the Hemispheres is a feature-length, non-fiction film examining philosopher Dan Lloyd’s Music of Thought Hypothesis. Lloyd’s research takes patterns found in brain activity and converts them into musical score. These scores are not biofeedback or music cognition experiments, but rather extracting the ‘architecture of consciousness,’ as it occurs in the brain, and assigning its varying components musical tones. The results are musical scores meant to reflect brain activity itself.
“Is brain activity more like music than it is like language? Is it more music than noise? Are its musical properties different in different states of mind, and are they different for healthy brains in contrast with schizophrenia and other mental illnesses? Increasingly, it seems the answers to these questions is Yes.” – Dan Lloyd
Through this, Lloyd is working toward developing a new theory of mind; that consciousness operates within a musical structure.
The “music” generated through Lloyd’s work seems oddly familiar, and is surprisingly harmonious and musical. Now, should this theory be proven, the philosophical implications are both joyous and endless. The idea that we are, in fact, music.
Music of the Hemispheres will investigate modes of data visualization, music composition, performance, and audition; their respective systems will be cracked open and compared to the examination of brain mechanics and the architecture of mind.
The film will be instructional entertainment, hearkening back to the wild science films and shows that blew our minds open as kids: Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, 3-2-1 Contact, Mr. Wizard.
Director Elisa Da Prato aims to bring music to life through visual allegories, instructional segments, musical sequences, and of course interviews with leading, cutting-edge thinkers in the fields of cognitive neuroscience, philosophy of mind, music theory, and music composition.
“When I first came across Lloyd’s work, it blew my heart right open — it fully expressed the elegance and joy of the beauty of the material universe, from which human consciousness emerges and then channels back into music. I see this project as the ultimate love-letter to the massive network of conduits that has carried me through my life; music.” – Director Elisa Da Prato
MOTH is both film and experiment, pairing artists with scientists, commissioning new musical works, documenting emerging breakthroughs in Music Cognition and Theory – offering it up to you in the form of a visual autopsy of the harmony within, and the colossal choir that is humankind. To learn more about the film, visit the website : www.musicofthehemispheres.com
This project will only be funded if at least $16,000 is pledged by Wednesday Jan 25, 4:13pm EST. – you can pledge as little as $1 here
“In 1895, radio communication emanated for the first time from the workshop of Guglielmo Marconi; since then radio signals have propagated 115 light years in all directions, passing through several thousand star systems. If alien astronomers happen to detect Marconi’s first tentative broadcast, and the myriad following, what could they infer about its source?
The alien astronomers can carve up the radio signal many different ways… The example is fanciful, but analogous to a mystery signal that ripples through real (earthly) science every day: the magnetic resonance (MR) signal emitted by brains in scanners around the world.” – Excerpt from Dan Lloyd’s Mind as Music paper, which you can read here.
181 Backers – $16,115 pledged of $16,000 goal – Funding Successful
This project successfully raised its funding goal about 23 hours ago.
Well done all involved the project is ON !
How the money will be spent:
Music of the Hemispheres is a very ambitious film tackling complex and beautiful ideas. The money raised here will allow us to continue to create this film at the highest production level possible and will bring us into phase II of our production: creative interviews with leaders from the fields of neuroscience, philosophy and music, as well as narrative scenes that help illuminate and investigate Dan Lloyd’s theory.