Dream Recorder (waking life)
The score was designed to be performed in both dream and wakeful states. Dream Recorder originated from an earlier project, “Dreaming in a Time of Pandemic,” inspired by recent research on how crises impact dreams and cognitive processes. So, quite literally the piece is intended to be performed in a dream. To do this the performer needs to do things like: mentally rehearse before sleep, practice dream journaling, use sound and light cues to help them realise they are dreaming etc. This waking-life adaptation, it has been expanded to a 20-minute performance with Dr. Alana Blackburn. The stage is arranged with a variety of mirrors that fragment our perception, echoing the unstable and distorted nature of mirrors in dreams. Looking at a mirror in a dream is a good way to determine whether you are dreaming or not. Some key questions that arise include: Can we consciously shape the music we experience in dreams? Does the performer hold any conscious or unconscious agency over their interpretation of the music? How do we engage with involuntary musical imagery? And in what ways does our brain “listen” to it?
A chemical structure model of a naturally occurring amino acid, L-tryptophan (left), is shown with its mirror image (right). ILLUSTRATION: N. BURGESS/SCIENCE
In physics, a team led by Neil Turok has proposed the existence of an “anti-universe” that runs backward in time before the Big Bang. I wondered what this ‘reversal’ of time could sound like, such as the relationship between predictable and unpredictable flows of time, and the counterintuitive co-formulation that we have with auditory objects. The mirror universe is an oppositional time to that of our own, which builds on the principle of symmetry in physics.
The mirror universe, with the big bang at the centre. Neil Turok, CC BY-SA
Premiered by Alana Blackburn, 19 November 2024, New England Regional Art Museum, Armidale, NSW, as part of the symposium Towards the Multimodal Sensorium: Experience, Wellbeing and Creativity.
Abstract: Dream Recorder is an installation/performance for contra-bass recorder that explores dreams and consciousness research in a performance context. This project is a multimodal composition intended to be performed in both a dream and a wakeful state. The wakeful installation/performance that people walk through is scattered with mirrors that fragment and intersect our perceptual field. Mirrors exhibit unstable and distorted characteristics in dreams due to their elusive and ephemeral nature. Forms reflected in mirrors are perpetually in flux, and reveal the inherent instability of perception. People walk around as if in a ‘dream’ state, taking in the ‘mirror affects’ and the ‘intermedial apparatus’. Mindfulness is likened to a mirror; it simply reflects what is there. It is not a process of thinking; it is preconceptual (Rosenberg, 2012). Windt (2018) explains that ‘conscious experience itself is in a sense virtual, an internal simulation upon which external stimuli exert a merely modulatory influence’. The amorphous, multisensorial gestures have potential to modulate sensory registers, our ‘inner mimicry’, and neural responses to affective and kinaesthetic empathy (Kim, 2015). The score, which can be performed either in a dream or wakeful state, uses a non-linear clock-like graphic notation. The clocks are enigmatic puzzles that challenges the performer to theorise musical procedures. It creates ‘temporal distortions’ or lapses of disassociation where the ‘duration of contemplation’ becomes a time-based parameter in the music. Analysis of the score in relation to the dream and waking performances can reveal insights into phenomenologically diverse/phenomenal experiences, questions of agency, multisensory empathy, and the modulatory affects of the auditory mirror neuron circuit.
References
Albu, C. 2016. Mirror Affect: Seeing Self, Observing Others in Contemporary Art. University of Minnesota Press.
Kim, J. H. 2015. ‘Kinaesthetic Empathy as Aesthetic Experience of Music’, Les Cahiers philosophiques de Strasbourg, 38, 119-138.
Rosenberg, L. 2004. Breath by Breath: The Liberating Practice of Insight Meditation. Shambhala Publications.
Windt, J. M. 2018. ‘Predictive Brains, Dreaming Selves, Sleeping Bodies: How the Analysis of Dream Movement can Inform a Theory of Self- and World-Simulation in Dreams’. Synthese, 195(6), 2577-2625.