Dan Lloyd, Brownell Professor of Philosophy, has created a revolutionary way to study the brain by creating “brain music.” He is shown here with projected brain data and his summer research assistant, Brian Castelluccio ’12.

by Caroline Deveau

Using data from functional magnetic resonance images (fMRIs), or brain scans, gathered at the Olin Neuropsychiatry Research Center in Hartford, Connecticut, philosophy professor Dan Lloyd uses computer software to assign a musical tone to each area of the brain. [As that area turns on during an activity, the tone is played.] The intensity of the tones is affected by the intensity of the activity. Like the keys of a piano, different regions of the brain are pushed harder, depending on the activity, contributing to the depth of the sounds produced.

Because the brain is filled with moving parts that are constantly changing, the resulting tones are a complex series of sounds. From there, Lloyd makes aesthetic adjustments—only using the 10 most active areas of the brain or varying the scale or key—that finesse the sounds into something that more closely represents what we think of as music.

“What I’m listening to is humanness,” says Lloyd, “which normally happens in silence and in the dark.”

Be-bops and blips turn into eerie melodies

So what does the brain actually sound like? Think of electronic be-bops and blips. But as Lloyd massages the channels and chooses different instrumental sounds—those of a piano, for instance, generated by a MIDI synthesizer—they take on an eerie melodic quality. One can hear harmonies and repetitive notes, and it really sounds like music.

Brain scans are not what you would consider tools of a philosopher. But Lloyd isn’t your typical philosopher. As a researcher, his central focus is human consciousness. “I’m interested in how the symphony [of consciousness] is conducted,” he explains.

The twist is that he examines consciousness on a neurological level. He wonders “What’s really going on, in the neurons, when we spot a familiar face, feel happy or hungry, add numbers in our head, or engage in thousands of other tasks that flow together in our moment-to-moment experience of the world and ourselves?”
Lloyd’s take on the brain scans is that they help him understand the brain from a global view. How do all the parts work together to define consciousness?

Healthy brains and brains affected by schizophrenia

Consciousness is complicated. Standard brain scan interpretations do not reveal the complexities of our brain’s areas working in unison. How can we visualize this data that is happening all at once and changing at such a rapid pace?

About five years ago, Lloyd theorized that sound might be a good representation of the brain’s activity.

“We are very sensitive listeners to complex, multilayered, polyphonic sounds,” he explains. And, in fact, humans are capable of discerning what they hear far better than what they see.

One of the revelations in listening to the music of the brain is that a change in activity is signaled by a tonal shift. During his research, Lloyd examined data from healthy brains and brains affected by schizophrenia. Played side by side, the tonal shift between the two brains is noticeable.