AXNS Collective, in partnership with Imperial College London, Music Hackspace and Somerset House, hosted a two-day workshop with sound artists and data analysts and neuroscientists.

In a landmark 2014 study, Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, Head of Psychedelic Research in the Division of Brain Sciences at Imperial College London, gave LSD to healthy volunteers while scanning their brains. They found that LSD has the potential to break through rigid thought patterns, suggesting that brain circuits that are overactive and reinforced in depression could be loosened under the drug. But there was much more to discover as Dr. Carhart-Harris explained: "The output of our brain imaging work is often a static image and really that’s not conveying the reality of how psychoactive drugs are changing the brain as biological systems aren’t static, they are characteristically dynamic."

That was the motivation for AXNS to organise a participatory event to take the brain wave data of this study outside of the lab. The essence of such brain wave data can be understood as a mixture of dynamic sine waves changing over time. AXNS wanted to draw on the expertise of those in another discipline who work with sine waves in a very different context: sound artists.

For the workshop, AXNS invited 5 sound artists from all over the world to work alongside 10 neuroscientists and data analysts, to explore the brain waves in novel ways and to create mind altering soundscapes from extracted features of the psychedelic brain data. Each sound artist was grouped with a neuroscientist and a data scientist. Each group received the same brain data as a starting point. Over course of the hackathon, Dr. Carhart-Harris and his team gave brief talks on their latest research and a concert-like presentation of the created work concluded the event.

This projects encouraged scientists to experiment with innovative and novel analysis techniques with the aim to expand the way scientists usually look at brain wave data, consciousness and potential new interventions for depression.

You can listen to all the tracks produced on soundcloud. One team who met at the event went on to begin their own group and have success at hacks in Science Gallery Dublin, and have produced music and art.

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Participating artists and scientists:
Andrew Bard
Joseph Barnby
Nwando Ebizie
Abigail Fletcher
Carl Golembeski
Steven Jerjian
Charles Matthews
Pascal Savy
Louis Schamroth-Green
Matthias Schultze-Kraft
Eyal Soreq
Rosy Southwell
Henrik von Coler
Hugo Weissbart
Timothy West
Adam John Williams
Emily Woods