MOTOR OVERFLOW

In principle, enough is now known and understood about the functional organization of the human brain that this knowledge should be able to play a role in the creative process of composing music, such that the music can be "aimed" at different brain structures, regions, and systems, affecting the emotional and cognitive response of the listener in novel and predictable ways. The purpose of the Motor Overflow project is to experiment with doing exactly this. ​T. T. Brown is a musician, neuroscientist, researcher, clinician, and medical school professor in human brain function who is attempting to use principles of human cerebral functional organization derived from scientific research to engage specific localized areas and distributed systems in the brains of listeners during music. This is a brief conceptual explanation of his approach to writing and composing music as Motor Overflow.

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It is well known that neurons in different regions of the brain have different receptive field properties; that is, they fire in response to receiving different kinds of information from the outside world. For example, right primary auditory cortex shows faster and higher amplitude responses to simple and artificial tones like sinusoidal waveforms, while left primary auditory cortex shows faster and higher amplitude neural activity to natural, more complex sounds with more harmonic distortion, such as human speech. Just based on this understanding alone about auditory sensory cortex, acoustic information can be designed that evoke brain activity responses with directed, dominant access to either the left or right cerebral hemispheres. While neurons in primary sensory regions code for the incoming low-level physical properties of sounds, such as tone, amplitude, and duration in the auditory modality, neurons downstream from purely sensory areas code for increasingly high-level, contextual, and abstract properties of the acoustic (and visual) stream as it moves through the hierarchy of cerebral functional organization. So even beyond sensory cortex, auditory streams should be able to be created to selectively engage different parts of the functional brain organization (attention, memory, language, executive control) by manipulating any and all properties of sound. 

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At long time intervals, the human brain recognizes and encodes forms of novelty and repetition in the auditory stream, both of which can contribute to the perception of a specific piece of music as being pleasing, strange, surprising, exciting, soothing, raucous, dissonant, nostalgic, and the like. Music that is simple, predictable, and conforms strongly to common conventions (such as in time signatures, chords progressions, rhythmic complexity, and phrase cycles), though often pleasing and sometimes preferred, will fail to forge new neural pathways and fail to engage new networks in the listener as compared to music that is more novel, less predictable, and more information-rich. Much modern popular music, even when it's new to your ears, fails to take advantage of the neurophysiological fact that complexity, dissonance, dyssynchrony, delay of gratification, and surprise will be better at driving novel brain activity patterns and can produce new pleasures of listening that are unobtainable by listening to overly familiar, predictable, and conventional sounds, chord progressions, patterns, rhythms, and structures.

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Motor Overflow is attempting to use this still-growing scientific understanding about the cognitive neuroscience of music and sound processing to create works that push the listener toward new biosonic perceptual experiences, driving novel patterns of brain activity and engagement, from low-level sensory cortex through to tertiary, transmodal, and prefrontal cortex; from subcortical emotion-evoking limbic structures and reward circuits to higher order cognitive and intellectual systems. A major aim is to produce music that promotes cognitive engagement, reflection, and thought, not merely engaging in emotional indulgence. Music created in a neuroscientifically informed way might be able to expand the listener's experience viscerally and cerebrally. That is the hope.

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Warning: Listening to Motor Overflow may induce involuntary movements of the digits, extremities, and limbs and has been known to cause near-dance experiences.