Constructed Stimuli

Anna Frida Jonsdottir's project Constructed Stimuli is about the intangible emotional transfer between sender and receiver during a musical performance. Like any other art form, music is a way of communication. Reaching far beyond language, provoking our thoughts and memories. In her experimental performance, Anna Frida, takes the role of a composer, creating music with the help of an EEG brain reading headset and a computer. The signals of the EEG is what controls the rhythm and the melody of the music performed. Anna Frida, in an attempt to control the music, sang emotion specific sounds, interpreted from research by Manfred Clynes, a concert pianist and scientist. The goal of the experiment was to construct a particular stimuli, a sound, that interprets a particular emotion. An expressive time-form created in an art performance containing an abstracted image of emotional pathways and information streams in our brain. Picking out a specific element of the experience of music and construct from it an image, an experience and hopefully a key to trigger an emotion in the receiver with the touch of a sine wave.

M.A. project from the Art and Science department of The University of Applied Arts Vienna.