Sonifications for Concert and Live Performance

Listening to the Mind Listening (LML) was a concert of sonifications staged at Sydney Opera House Studio in 2004. The concert was initially organised as an evening of entertainment for the attendees at the International Conference on Auditory Display where sonification is one of the main areas of research. The entertainment at previous ICAD meetings had included sound art and avante-gard music performances, but this was the first time that the material of the research itself was to be served up as entertainment. However, the expense of staging the concert far outweighed the financial support available from conference registrations. This led to the idea of ticketing the concert to the general public. But would the prospect of listening to the electrical activity of the human brain draw the audience numbers required to raise the necessary funds? An advertisement was placed in the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper, and we crossed our fingers that it would catch the public imagination. The advertisement described a concert of sonified EEG data in a 16 speaker sound system