From Scribble Into Meaning: a collaboration provides music and Science with an Architecture That Conveys the Veiled and Simultaneous Competitions of Conscious Experience
VIEW FROM THE STRANGERS' GALLERY - An oratorio on the nature of conscious experience and the emergence of the self

"View From The Strangers' Gallery" is a musical rendering of how the clamor of competing voices, within the parliamentary chamber of the mind, can yield the experience of consciousness. The oratorio uses polyphony to illustrate the multi-layered complexity of processing systems in the brain and the significance of recursive structures. Through the work's structure as well as its interaction of music and text, the work illustrates topics in cognitive science including Chalmers' problem of "first-person perspective" reports on mental states; Dennett's amplification of the Multiple Drafts Model of consciousness, and Humphrey's idea of "self-binding" as traced to child development.

Finally, we hope that the discussion will show how that meaning in music, such as there is, is not merely referential or structural, with the rest being "beautiful scribble." Rather, fragmented, abstract forms can be used to refer to simultaneous events that occur in the brain over very small time frames, and that flexibly varying the depth of polyphonic structures can illustrate the ebb and flow of activation, attention, and simultaneity in multiple streams of consciousness. Above all, it is our hope that by applying the musical language of popular song to fugal composition, that we will have created a work that will delight and inform the scientific and artistic community.

Brian Felsen-
is a professionally-trained pianist and graduate of the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1993 he created and ran the Philadelphia Music Conference, an international music festival, working with many gold-record-selling artists such as Lisa Loeb, The Nixons, Phil Spector, and Nirvana, and is credited with discovering several major-label recording artists. In 1997, he studied at the Mannes School of Music and then moved to Istanbul to begin work on View From The Strangers' Gallery. While living in Turkey, he also produced a documentary film about the Turkish military interventions and coups d'etat which received ETVS' highest grant award for 1999, and which is distributed through Boyut Films on VHS and in a forthcoming DVD/book package.

URL: www.brianfelsen.com

Nicholas Humphrey-
is School Professor at the LSE and Professor of Psychology at the New School for Social Research in New York, is a theoretical psychologist, internationally known for his work on the evolution of human intelligence and consciousness. His interests are wide ranging: He studied mountain gorillas with Dian Fossey in Rwanda; was the first to demonstrate the existence of "blindsight" after brain damage in monkeys; proposed the now celebrated theory of the "social function of intellect"; and is the only scientist ever to edit the literary journal Granta. His books include Consciousness Regained, The Inner Eye, and A History of the Mind. He has been the recipient of several honours, including the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, and the British Psychological Society's book award.

Daniel C. Dennett-
is University Professor, Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, and Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. His books include Content and Consciousness, Brainstorms, Elbow Room, The Intentional Stance, Consciousness Explained, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Kinds of Minds, and Brainchildren: A Collection of Essays. Professor Dennett co-edited The Mind's I with Douglas Hofstadter in 1981 and is the author of over two hundred scholarly articles on various aspects on the mind, published in journals ranging from Artificial Intelligence and Behavioral and Brain Sciences to Poetics Today and the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. He has received two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Science; he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1987. He was the Co-founder and Co-director of the Curricular Software Studio at Tufts, and has helped to design museum exhibits on computers for the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Science in Boston, and the Computer Museum in Boston. He also sings in a choral ensemble, the New England Classical Singers, and is an amateur jazz pianist and arranger.

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page last modified 09/04/01