Music makes you smarter? That idea made the rounds a generation back, but now we've got the facts: music and dance can not only affect your brain, but can bring brains together.
Yep, it's a fascinating project that happened in Houston, and now it's a brand-new release from Navona Records, with music by Houston composer Anthony Brandt.
His works Livewire and Meeting of Minds feature innovative dance scores created in collaboration with NobleMotion Dance and the University of Houston's IUCRC BRAIN Center. These projects ended up being both performances and scientific experiments, where dancers wore mobile brain-body imaging devices to better understand brain interaction, as they danced to Brandt's bewitching string quartet music.
Then they showed live visualizations of neural synchrony between the dancers' brains — displayed in real time onstage. Audiences were mesmerized.
Brandt was kind enough to drop in on Classical Connections to talk more about the whole thing. He says, "The more science looks at the brain the more it sees that it is connected to us as a whole being." A colleague approached him about doing this project for a Houston conference.
"I immediately had the idea — because I've been interested for a long time in the brain — of writing a piece in which each movement would depict a different feature of brain behavior, and the dance would help to illustrate that. And then the science could study it." The result was Livewire. "The dance was for nine dancers; two of them wore mobile brain/body imaging equipment, with live data from their brain being displayed on a monitor. ... So the audience could actually look inside the minds of the dancers, and see not only what was happening in their brains, but also how the two brains were synchronizing with each other."
They performed Meeting of Minds at the UN's AI For Good Global Summit in Geneva back in May. "That was amazingly exciting. We were presenting this new music and new dance in a forum all about technology and AI, and it was such a cool environment to be in, and we were all so excited to share this research/art with the international community."
He adds, "It was very moving to do Meeting of Minds at the United Nations, because part of the underlying theme of the piece is about two minds that start very polarized from each other, and gradually come together. And you not only hopefully hear that in the music and see that in the dance: you also see that in what we call the brain synchrony meter, which showed the two minds gradually becoming more and more intertwined and cooperative. And so hopefully it was a demonstration of what might be possible in our world."
The Navona Records recordings are available on all the major platforms.
