Dr. Dan Lloyd is a music geek in the most literal sense of the term. He makes musical scores out of brain scans and plays them in a trippy, electro-computer sort of way. He’s a “neuro-philosopher,” or a “smart hippie,” and he teaches at Trinity College in Connecticut. Tomorrow night The Lickets will be playing a set at Issue Project Room with a bunch of scores Dan made from scans of brain activity. I probed Dan’s brain to find out how his music works.

Can you describe what it is that you do?
Yeah, so it begins in a brain scanner which produces a stream of numbers. When you see a normal brain scan, what you’re seeing is those numbers reconstructed as images, but I’m taking that same stream of numbers and reconstructing them to sounds. Think of different parts of your brain as if they were different musical instruments or even keys on a piano, and when those parts are more active, a different “pitch,” or a different liveness comes from that part. I put all that together, then put it through a computer and it turns into sound.

OK, so you’re just attributing different sounds to spikes in brain activity?
Right, I use the properties of the brain activity itself to determine the properties of the sound. There are lots of spikes, so if the spikes are becoming more or less active, the notes are getting louder or softer, and what comes out of that is a whole texture, a whole melodic and harmonic texture. There are different ways to map it though, sometimes I let the properties of the brain determine the loudness of it, sometimes it determines the harmonics of it, sometimes pitch, sometimes mixes of all of those. So there’s different ways to do it, and they’re all equally valid because they all transform the data in the same way.

It sounds really electronic.
Yeah, it’s all done in a scientific programming language called Matlab.

The electronic sounds are pretty good, but have you ever taken one of your scores and played it with like a banjo or a whiskey jug?
Well, I’ve made them using mini-synthesizers before. The Lickets are going to do that at the show on Wednesday night. I made some scores from a scanned brain and sent them out to The Lickets. So they’re going to realize the brain as instrumental music live.

Trippy. If a person is angry or thinking about a lot of stuff, does that affect the music?
Well, level of activity does show up. I’m not sure about specific emotions without really having an experiment. You see, it depends on the data I have whether I can compare anger to non-anger. But, for example, between healthy people and schizophrenia patients there is an audible difference that audiences can pick out quite well.

What’s the difference between the schizophrenia patient and the normal person?
The schizophrenia patient’s brain areas tend to oscillate more rapidly. So either the pitches are higher, if you map it that way, or the individual pitches are getting louder and softer more rapidly–in other words the rhythm is faster in the schizophrenic brain. This has been confirmed without the music, just from scientifically looking at the actual statistics of the brains themselves. So what you’re hearing is actually what’s there.

How did you realize you could make music out of brain activity?
I’ve always been impressed by the complexity of the brain and consciousness. It occurred to me maybe seven years ago that one way to be able to simultaneously grasp a lot of complex information is through sound, because the ears can discriminate different frequencies without blurring them together. And so I thought, well, this is complex data, I should be able to convert it to sound somehow.

Do dumb people make shittier music than smart people because they don’t have as much brain activity going on?
I wouldn’t expect it. I think the real lesson of all these brain music tracks is that in a lot of ways we’re all quite similar. We’re all making symphonies all the time, and it’s not that different when you’re resting and seemingly doing nothing than when you’re doing something that’s intensely intellectual.

Can you just look at the results and tell if it’s going to make a good score or not? Or do you have to map it all out and listen to it first to see what you have?
I can just look at it. I guess I’ve put in enough hours to do that.

Think you’ll ever have some nubile coeds grinding to your brain music in the clubs?
Well, my students put it on their ipods, so I don’t know if that’s the first step or not. But The Lickets are going to make it into their style of music, so I would like to think that it will show up on their next album.

So what does the raw brain data look like before you convert it into music?
It looks like four gigabytes of numbers. You could think of it as a single stream, or you could think of it as a giant spreadsheet, and each spreadsheet is a different site of the brain. Where there’s more physiological activity the number is bigger, so it’s like the stock market on 20 to 100,000 different graphs. Basically it’s huge. The whole challenge of neuroscience is to deal with the hugeness of it.

On average, how long does it take from when you get the raw data until it’s turned into a musical score?
I would have to say weeks to months, mainly because there are so many possibilities within the data. I’m constantly looking for ways to display it with more clarity.

Music of the Hemispheres from Index Magazine on Vimeo.

JONATHAN SMITH