MOTOR OVERFLOW

In principle, enough is now 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 decades of scientific research to engage specific localized areas and distributed systems in the brains of listeners during music. What follows is a brief conceptual explanation of his approach to writing and composing music as Motor Overflow.

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It is well established 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 and features like fast formant transitions, such as human speech. Just based on this understanding alone about auditory sensory cortex, acoustic stimuli can be designed that evoke brain activity responses with directed, initial dominant access to either the left or right cerebral hemisphere. 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 over short and long time intervals. 

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Beyond just briefly conveyed auditory characteristics like timbre, pitch, and tone, the functional brain organization also responds to aspects of the auditory signal that are conveyed at long time intervals, encoding forms of novelty and repetition, rhythm and beat, chords, melodies and harmonies. All of these features 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 preferred, will be less potent at forging new neural pathways and likely will not engage new circuits and networks in the listener as compared to music that is more novel, less predictable by the brain, more complex, and more information-rich. Much popular music, even when a specific song is new to the ears of the listener, fails to take advantage of the neurophysiological fact that complexity, dissonance, dyssynchrony, delay of gratification, violation of statistical regularities, and surprise will be better at driving new brain activity patterns, which may can produce new pleasures of listening that are unobtainable by listening to overly familiar, predictable, and conventional sounds, chord progressions, forms, patterns, rhythms, and structures.

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Typically, listeners judge music that is new to their ears by evaluating whether it makes them immediately feel gratified. That's fair and will likely always be the case, but in principle, there is likely some music that could be good for the health and well being of the listener that is not immediately pleasing or emotionally rewarding. Some music may be intended to produce other perhaps less superficial and immediate benefits and pleasures to the listener. Indeed, much music already exists that seeks to evoke complex cognitive and emotional responses from listeners. It remains an open empirical question whether our now quite advanced scientific understanding about human functional brain organization can be used to guide the creation of music for these purposes.

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Motor Overflow is an ongoing attempt to use scientific knowledge about the cognitive neuroscience of music and sound processing to create works that push the listener toward new biosonic perceptual, cognitive, emotional, and motor 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. Music created in a neuroscientifically informed way might be able to expand the listener's experience both 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.