GRACE LESLIE: We all know intuitively
and for centuries that music is a very, very powerful
human experience, and we know that it brings people
health and well-being.
But we're not quite there in terms of understanding
on a scientific level why that is.
My name is Grace Leslie, and I study brain music for a living,
and I also conduct brain music research
at Georgia Tech in Atlanta.
The goal of my research is to develop
new kinds of music technologies that
are going to use brain and body signals
and see how we can incorporate these into new kinds of music,
new kinds of musical interfaces that are going to bring us
health and well-being.
One of the most fun parts about my job
is I get to direct the Brain Music Lab, which I started here
when I arrived.
One of the projects that is ongoing in the Brain Music Lab
is playing heartbeats to people.
What we're finding is there's actually a effect
that this heartbeat listening has
on your ability to feel what somebody else is feeling.
Another student that I'm working with, he's
applying all different kinds of machine learning methods
to actually predict imagined music
or listened music from having only their EEG data.
So what are all these brain and body signals
that I'm talking about?
I can start out with EEG, which is my favorite one.
EEG stands for electroencephalogram,
and this is a way that we place sensors,
like the cap that you see here, on somebody's scalp.
And these sensors are measuring voltage created deep
inside the brain.
When I'm talking about EDA, I'm referring
to electrodermal activity.
This is a way to measure how aroused
our central nervous system.
When I'm talking about ECG, this is the acronym
for an electrocardiogram.
What we're picking up is voltage,
and we can attach these in a particular configuration
around the heart to measure a lot of different features
of somebody's heartbeat.
Over several years of practicing what
I like to call brain body music performance,
I started out being very focused on these new interfaces that
is going to record input from the way
that my body signals perform onstage, turn them
into music so that I can learn how to use
that in an expressive way.
I developed a new kind of algorithm
that takes an incoming EEG signal,
and I convert that into sound on the computer.
And I learned how to manipulate these brainwaves to produce
different kinds of sounds in a musically performative way.
I started to recognize that the most powerful way that I
can influence this brain activity while I'm onstage
is actually to pay attention to the body instead.
When somebody asks me about how I tune my instrument,
I would have to say, that tuning happens not from me
tuning the instrument itself.
It happens from me tuning my body to a particular frequency.
My heartbeat might be 70 times per minute.
Oftentimes, when I'm performing, that will drop very much
or rise very much, depending on how much I'm
holding my breath as a result of playing these really
long notes on the flute.
Eventually, I developed a way to manipulate my breathing pattern
onstage in order to create this kind of expressive arc
and to reach a different kind of physiological state
in order to express this sense of deep calm.
A lot of people ask me, do you always
have to make music that sounds like a warm bathtub?
The musical nature of this, the sound qualities,
the timbres that I produce, that is actually
very inherent to this idea of inviting somebody
to synchronize with me.
What I'm doing is developing music
that I believe sounds very new.
And it's something that is exciting for me
to share this new experience with my audience.
The music and the research are incredibly intertwined.
I don't think any part of this work
could exist without the other.
It's using that data to understand
how music that I compose is going
to affect people's brains and people's body signals,
their heart rate, their breathing, their skin
conductance levels.
And I'm using that knowledge to inform the way that I compose
this particular kind of music.