During Spring Quarter, the Stanford Arts Institute will be profiling the 2014–15 Honors in the Arts cohort. This interdisciplinary honors program allows students in any major to complete a capstone project integrating arts practice or theory with another field of study, To learn more, visit artsinstitute.stanford.edu/honors.
The experience of classical music is the effort of at least three: the composer, the musician, and the listener. While imprecise in the sense that the composer’s message to the audience will inevitably be altered by the musician’s interpretation, this effort makes for a layered experience, one which senior Iris Wu examines in her musical composition for Honors in the Arts, titled Gehirnrauschen, or German for Brain Murmurs.
“As a musical performer, there’s always tension between what the performer brings to the music and how the performer serves as a vessel for someone else’s music,” said Wu, who is a classically trained pianist. “I wanted to do a poetic exploration of what the music was doing to me, and also how I was contributing to the music.”
“I wanted to do a poetic exploration of what the music was doing to me, and also how I was contributing to the music,” said Wu.
The title of Wu’s composition is a reference to Romantic-era composer Franz Liszt’s Waldesrauschen, or Forest Murmurs, which Wu performed and recorded as the first part of her project. She recorded her brain activity while listening to her own performance, which was the closest approximation to recording brain activity while performing. Then, she sonified the frequency data she collected to find correlations between brain activity and musical events.
What she found was subtler than she had expected—for instance, there wasn’t necessarily a direct correlation between the musical score and brain activity. Instead, high activity could indicate a variety of things, such as excitement over encountering a preferred section, or anxiousness over a more difficult part. The sonification turned out to be what she described as “an atomspheric trilling texture which was supposed to represent my brain.”
She then used this to reinterpret Waldesrauschen, recreating in the end Gehirnrauschen, her first piano composition which essentially is a musical representation of her brain activity while she played Waldesrauschen. The composition is reminiscent of works from the late Romantic, Impressionist period, woven with arpeggios, trills and scales to represent the warbling EEG data. Ironically, Wu had difficulties learning her own piece on the piano—”I think I went a little crazy trying to convey it,” she said.
Ultimately, the project is part of her larger vision to understand the visceral reactions humans have toward music, a relationship she has been probing in her self-designed concentration, “Music and Psychocognition” within the HumBio major.
She initially had in mind something more technical for her Honors in the Arts project, which might scientifically respond to her explorations, but focused instead on her artistic expression.
“Because I come from a science background, it was hard for me to get rid of that mindset—research, question, scientific inquiry—and do something with a looser form,” Wu said. “Having the workshop helped me expand my definition of the project and the creative process.”
Wu will perform Gehirnrauschen at 2:30 p.m. during the Honors in the Arts symposium on June 3. The symposium will run from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. at the Cantor Auditorium.
