David Rosenboom

Is the ultimate origin of pure imagination accessible to us? Probably not, and consciousness may be more fundamental than awareness. Callasso writes, “Mind is the air in which consciousness breathes”, though mind and speech constantly battle over clarity. Is the problem due to how we language our idea of origin? Music is a nonlinguistic universe offering opportunities to inhabit liminal landscapes in between local manifestations of mind, language, and imagination within a nonlocal consciousness field without origin. Perceiving forms enacts extraction. Forms are extracted by perceivers that are themselves extractions marked by closed boundaries withing environments. They are not fixed. Perceiving forms involves extracting differentiable entities from continuously emerging and evolving phenomena that can be stored and referred to as parts of the fine structures of particular nows, each with its synthesized past and projected future. Multiple nows may emerge in a consciousness field. From over five decades working with neuromusical propositions, brainwave music, neurocybernetic opera, biofeedback and the arts, I can extract some salient points relevant to these questions. Some technical tools have included: 1) EEG concomitants of what we call states of consciousness, influencing how information may be processed in performance and spontaneous forms emerge, and 2) auditory event-related potentials (AERPs) in composed feedback-based paradigms, parsing times and forms in what I call active imaginative listening as performance. I will touch briefly on several of my relevant historical works and then extract details from the propositions in two specific ones: 1) my neurocybernetic opera, On Being Invisible II (Hypatia Speaks to Jefferson in a Dream) and 2) Ringing Minds, in which a group of brains is treated as one big performing brain (created in collaboration with Tim Mullen and Alexander Khalil). Both works involve multi-agent BCIs.

David Rosenboom is a post-genre composer-performer-author whose work since the 1960s has traversed multifaceted musical performance, spontaneously evolving forms in composition, cross-cultural collaborations, interactive multimedia, new instrument technologies, performance art, improvisation, art-science research and philosophy, and brain art. His writings and recordings have had a major influence on the meeting ground of neuroscience with creative music and arts practice. He regularly presents in international venues and has had major retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Centre Pompidou-Metz, Tokyo Opera City, and other places. He continues to be widely published and recorded and is working on his forthcoming book, Propositional Music. During his long career he has held important positions at SUNY Buffalo, Electric Circus (New York), York University (Toronto), Mills College (Oakland), CalArts (Los Angeles), and others. During his fifty-year retrospective at the Whitney in 2015, the New York Times referred to him as an “avatar of experimental music”.