Guide to Brain-Computer Music Interfacing Eduardo Reck Miranda Julien Castet Editors Guide to Brain-Computer Music Interfacing 123 Editors Eduardo Reck Miranda Julien Castet Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Immersion Music Research (ICCMR) Bordeaux Plymouth University France Plymouth UK ISBN 978-1-4471-6583-5 ISBN 978-1-4471-6584-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-4471-6584-2 Library of Congress Control Number: 2014946764 Springer London Heidelberg New York Dordrecht © Springer-Verlag London 2014 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. 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Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com) Foreword Brain-Computer Music Interfacing (BCMI): One Place Where Science and Music May Meet in Deep Theoretical Territory There is little doubt that as we gain facility in the intense, disciplined practices required to probe the origins of musical impulses, pathways of emergence can be observed and experienced by tracing backward down trails left in the normally outward flowering of forms from the brain, from their initial neural geneses, upward through their manifestations in neural network holarchies,1 and finally to their manifestations in localized, time‐space expressions. Along these pathways, the languaged forms of the presumably testable theoretical models of science and the investigative, speculative models of propositional music converge. Propositional music involves a point of view about composing in which com- posers might build proposed models of worlds, universes, evolution, brains, con- sciousness or whole domains of thought and life, and then proceed to make dynamical musical embodiments of these models, inviting us to experience them in spontaneously emerging sonic forms (Rosenboom 2000a). For musicians who are interested in deep conceptual and theoretical investigations, BCMI is a natural attractor and a predictable outgrowth from mid-twentieth century explosions in interdisciplinary thinking, Cybernetics, Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics, Systems Theory, self-organization, morphogenesis, algorithmic music, and so on. Following early explorations in BCMI from that time, we are now experiencing a new flowering of what might be called antidisciplinary thinking in the arts and sciences, which, among other things, reexamines fundamental distinctions among scientific and cultural languages (Beech 2013). Some extant model paradigms that employ BCMI in artistic creation can legit- imately claim to be new musical propositions. Others focus more on direct map- pings of neurological data onto acoustic parameters of sound or components of traditionally familiar musical structures. Both may reveal fruitful investigative 1 The term holarchy is used to refer to structures that have both top-down and bottom-up dynamical aspects. v vi Foreword pathways; and there is a big difference between them. Direct mapping, often called sonification, draws on the profoundly integrative powers of auditory perception— possibly enhanced by musical experience and training—to hear relationships and find clues to hidden orders and unsuspected patterns. With careful, active imagi- native listening, we can learn to distinguish the features of complexity and parse subtle relationships among differentiable, complex entities. Our auditory perception and cognition toolkits can be fine-tuned in these respects to extraordinary degrees. Later, we can probe these newly perceived patterns and quantify them with other investigative tools. Aesthetic propositions, on the other hand, may probe the very nature of thought, itself—in this case musical thought—and its symbiotic inhabiting of the brain in co-creative, adaptive, emergent, feedback-driven phenomena. Cir- cling back to scientific exploration, these musical BCMI propositions may fuel important investigations into the nature of prediction, presumed causal relation- ships, ways to understand the global functions of the brain and other insights leading to paradigm shifts, from which even new practical applications may follow. Here again, the integrative powers of musical perception and musical cognition may be brought to bear on deep aesthetic investigations, which may, in return, offer important insights and clues for scientific explorations and theoretical modeling. Musical BCMI propositions, if we are alert, may take us back to first principles again and again, questioning our understanding of evolution and categorization. Recalling Charles Sanders Peirce’s doctrine of dicisigns, we might soon discover a biomusical semiotics emerging from neuro-musical propositions. See (Stejernfelt 2014) for an analysis of the doctrine of dicisigns. We should be careful, though, to avoid the potential misconception of BCMI as MCMI (Mind-Computer Music Interfacing). At the moment, we don’t really know any more about what the mind is than we know about what energy is. Richard Feynman reminds us that all we really know about energy is that it is related to some quantity we can calculate that doesn’t change when things happen (conser- vation law) (Feynman 1995). Similarly, we don’t really have a good characteriza- tion of what mind is, except we claim to be able to sense its presence. We do have many interesting speculative theories about the mind’s emergence (Swan 2013), and some may pan out. It may be that minds have evolved to be able to know—perhaps an illusion—what other minds are thinking and feeling.2 Perhaps the concept of mind equates to what we believe we can know as being relatively constant when we are observing relationships among entities that we differentiate as individually unique and label as being conscious. Is mind a constraint-based, emergent phe- nomena that might have begun already with proto-life forms (Deacon 2013)? And what about intelligence? Nobody seems to really know clearly what it is, but everyone believes they can tell when it is absent. Are intelligences differentiable and knowable in advance of their encounter? Perhaps intelligence might be also 2 I’ve been thinking about this a lot after discussing it with cognitive scientist (also a musician), Scott Makeig, Driector of the Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Foreword vii considered as a field,orintellisphere, perhaps even on inter-stellar scales (Rosen- boom 2003b). Stjernfelt invokes the term cognitive field in describing Peirce’s undoing of the misleading dualisms that dangerously pocket this intellectual terrain, particularly when considering causal modeling (Stjernfelt 2014). Yet, how do we describe what’s going on in the brain in holistic terms, the interacting of neural atoms in a macro-form? Here again we have propositional language issues. There is imprecision in propositions, though imprecise meanings also have value. The term, field, has a precise meaning, as in vector field, but also imprecise ones, as in the nature of chreods or zones of influence (Thom 1975). Quantum paradigms have taught us that the universe is not a precision instrument. Imprecision and approx- imation cannot be overcome. Rather, though, they have value in permitting guided explorations into the fringes of thought. So BCMI is striving to balance its need for precision in developing practical applications with its also critical need to explore imprecise paradigms, which often enable breakthroughs in thought and vision. BCMI is destined to open new doors, as long as we remain open to the unpredictable. We need to gain better under- standing of global complexity in both brains and music. BCMI may offer useful tools for this. Music is fundamentally about time, and therefore about qualities of change. The spatiotemporal evolution of holistic brain phenomena is also about qualities of change. This is a good match for unveiling the future. My own work with BCMI began in the 1960s (Rosenboom 1972, 1976a, 1976b, 1977, 1990,