World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

At the World Science Festival in June here in New York, specialists – including musical specialist Bobby McFerrin – gathered to ask what in music we humans hear universally, versus what is culturally specific.

Is our response to music hard-wired or culturally determined? Is the reaction to rhythm and melody universal or influenced by environment? Join host John Schaefer, Jamshed Barucha, scientist Daniel Levitin, Professor Lawrence Parsons and musical artist Bobby McFerrin for live performances and cross cultural demonstrations to illustrate music’s note-worthy interaction with the brain and our emotions.

You can watch a series of five video highlights, but the one above is perhaps the most striking. (I believe it’s already more than made the rounds around the Interwebs, but, well, we can say we were all busy creating digital music.)

Notes and Neurons videos

It’s funny just how low the average person’s opinion of their musical ability can be. Ask an average “non-musician,” and they’ll often claim to be deaf to rhythm and pitch. Push the issue, though, and typically you’ll discover quite the opposite. Listen as the crowd laughs at discovering they all share some basic intuition about how pitch works. These are, after all, science and neurology types, not musicians.

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Brainpipe is a psychedellic journey down the neural pathways, a long, strange trip into the minds of an unusual band of independent game designers. And while some games demand muscular graphics cards or brilliant flat panels, this is one that requires playing with headphones. The immersive sense of the descent down this brain’s pathway is entirely dependent on its sound. While even big development houses often license sound engines, the band of hard-core designers at Digital Eel also rolled their own interactive audio code to make the sounds fully seamless.

Designers and developers Iikka Keränen (the primary coder) and Rich Carlson spoke to me about their work. (They make reference to artist Bill “Phosphorous” Sears, as well.) In the process, they have a lot to say about the design process, about ambient sound design and composition, that goes well beyond just the gaming world. This isn’t just about gaming: it’s truly about digital music.

Digital Eel has won three excellence in audio awards over the past six years from the Independent Games Festival, including, most recently, a nomination for the psychedellic hit “Brainpipe” at the Game Developer Conference this spring. Incredibly, though, says Digital Eel’s Brainpipe, in that time no one has interviewed them about the sound in their games. Independent of the interview, Rich concede to me the challenge of getting people to focus on sound:

People are focused on graphics –and gameplay– and, you know, sound always gets the short shrift, even at game companies.  Sound and music are always the smallest slice of the development budget pie.

But not so at Digital Eel.  Sound and music are integral and integrated with design from the first moment we have something happening on the screen.  We feel it must be, and not just sfx but music, especially music which so often sounds like something….like dressing, something painted on, like makeup or apartment paint to help cover up the picture holes on the walls.

Brainpipe Game Page (with Mac/Windows download links – demos available so if you hate this, you’ll find out!)

Brainpipe on Steam (Windows only)

At a glance:

Engine: Custom

Favorite inspiration: demoscene, The Dig, Star Control II, Stockhausen, Varese, Morton Subotnick, Ussachevsky

Special acheivements: hiding loop points, creating a seamless acoustic descent, tapping into your subconscious

As an addendum to why trying to make computer models musically creative can be so disastrous, maybe the problem is we fail to understand what creativity is.

Scientists funded by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) have found that, when jazz musicians are engaged in the highly creative and spontaneous activity known as improvisation, a large region of the brain involved in monitoring one’s performance is shut down, while a small region involved in organizing self-initiated thoughts and behaviors is highly activated.

Study: Prefrontal Cortex In Jazz Musicians Winds Down When Improvising [scientificblogging]

That’s just one study, and I won’t pretend to be an expert in neuroscience. But what the scientists are describing is awfully close to the nuanced way jazz musicians will describe improv. It’s not not thinking. But it’s also not self-monitoring. It’s something else.