Video excerpt of the world premiere (2004) of Sounds of Complexity, an audiovisual live performance by Kinotek.

concept - "sounds of complexity" is an artistic project that moves from the field of cognitive science and neurosciences. It's an audiovisual performance in which the sound materials and the visual mappings are the consequence of very complex and stratified processes that hardly can be represented with symbolic forms in our world. It's an attempt to make audible and visible the dynamics and the interactions that for their richness, variety and complexity are unheard and invisible.
The audio material of the performance derives from the analogic recording of cerebral activities through an analogic elettroencephalograph (EEG) and corresponds to the discharges of billions of neurons situated in the sixth layer of human cerebral cortex, disposed vertically respect to the scalp.
The crude sound of brain is translated in an audible frequencies through techniques of pitch shifting; such material is then processed digitally in real time and the corresponding frequencies transformed in a Cartesian space to form visual trajectories projected on four screens that react dynamically; "it has to be considered in the first place the possibility offered by such sounds to represent the oscillatory phenomena, cyclical and rhythmic that govern our cerebral life, whose function is to synchronize periodically the activities of approximately 1000000000000 neurons, in order to allow the emergence of advanced phenomena like consciousness. The most part of cerebral oscillators are in the range between 10 Hz (alpha rhythm) and 40 Hz (gamma rhythm)."

project website: kinotek.org/soundsofcomplexity.html