Joel Werner
speaker
1,849 appearances
34 recordings
2 series
first heard Sep 2011
last heard Nov 2017
Joel Werner’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Brant's fit eventually came, and it's the data recorded by those electrodes on his scalp that Brian transformed into the music you've been hearing throughout this episode.
The way Brian composed this song, or the algorithm that he wrote composed this song, draws on three elements of the EEG data.
The amplitude, or the height of the brainwaves, which is a measure of how active the brain is.
the frequency, or the number of brain waves that occur in a given amount of time, this is a measure of how alert the person is, and the synchrony, or the relative activity of different parts of the brain.
And then he just maps changes in these three variables to changes
As well as mapping to loudness, amplitude controls the vocals in the song as well.
composition.
They're the dominant feature of the song.
And to generate them, Brian sampled the Imogen Heap song, Hide and Seek.
brain.
By sampling a well-known song, Brian also plays into Brandt's experience of the musical aura, where songs he hears or even thinks about during the seizure are warped, twisted and incorporated into the music.
In addition to the vocals, Brian sampled strings from the Philharmonia sound sample library and percussion from the American experimental rock band Swans.
And then he just let the algorithm do its thing.
I'll play the song in full at the end of this episode, but first, what does Brant think of this song that was composed using his seizure data?
That's it.
Some of All Parts is produced by me, Joel Werner, Sophie Townsend is story editor, Jonathan Webb is science editor, and the sound design is by me and Mark Don.
Huge thanks to Brant Guishard for two of the most compellingly honest interviews I've done in my career.
Brant, this just wouldn't be a story without you.
Thank you.
Thanks also to Brian Fu, a data visualisation artist at the American Museum of Natural History,
Showing 41–60 of 1,849 · page 3 of 93
← Previous
Next →