Headspace
HeadSpace is Alicia Champlin’s new live-coded performance using her own EEG data as a control signal, mapping brainwaves into sound through harmonic structures linked to Schumann resonances.
About the project
In this work, Champlin’s live EEG data is used as a control signal, focusing on the naturally occurring octaves (frequency doubling) within the EEG signal spectrum. As a method of sonifying the brainwave signals, they are mapped into a sequence of audible frequencies through live coded sound synthesis and stepped through a modulating harmonic series derived from Schumann resonance frequencies.
The overlap between EEG signals and the Schumann resonance within the electromagnetic spectrum poses an intriguing synchronicity and thought experiment. By pairing these two domains, and manipulating them through live-coding 40 individual synthesizers while programmatically mixing signals in real time, Champlin creates a soundscape narrative where biofeedback interacts with atmospheric feedback.
Abstract
Working with biodata as a control signal requires difficult choices about how to map the dimensions of the signal onto whatever it is controlling. Because most biodata has a very low signal-to-noise ratio, the challenge is to avoid arbitrary mappings that amount to little more than noise filtering. The task is to identify potential patterns and amplify them in a way that allows them to articulate themselves.
In HeadSpace, Champlin uses live EEG data as a control signal, with a focus on the naturally occurring octaves (frequency doubling) within the EEG signal spectrum. The brainwave signals are mapped through live coded sound synthesis into a sequence of audible frequencies, and stepped over time through a modulating harmonic series derived from Schumann resonance frequencies. The overlap between EEG and the Schumann resonance in the electromagnetic spectrum provides a foundation for synchronicity and speculation.
Through this pairing, live-coded across 40 synthesizers and mixed programmatically in real time, the piece brings two omnipresent but hidden phenomena together in a soundscape narrative that layers biofeedback with atmospheric feedback.
The work draws on Champlin’s previous projects with sonified EEG in live performance and live coded sound using TidalCycles, MaxMSP, and PureData. These explorations of primitive oscillators through AM and FM synthesis have produced rich vocabularies of sound emerging from noise.
At its core, the piece investigates live biofeedback as a performance methodology, making audible the recursive effect of manipulating sonified brainwaves in real time, with the brain itself acting as both transmitter and receiver. The performer becomes the first member of the audience, problem-solving the sound of problem-solving, while the rest of the audience is invited into this intimate space—scaled up and shared through the application of Earth’s harmonic series.
Given the personal and reflexive nature of biofeedback, HeadSpace also asks what it means to engage in biofeedback within a live setting. The presence of the audience inevitably shapes the atmosphere and therefore feeds back into the signal itself, making the audience an active part of the control system. Liveness, in this context, is characterized by shared ephemeral experience and collective witnessing—an expansive intimacy that Champlin leverages as an essential element of the performance.
Exhibited at
About Alicia Champlin
Alicia Champlin is an american intermedial artist and researcher based in Barcelona. Her interactive performance “I Am Sitting…” has been staged at Black Mountain College {RE:Happening} in NC; Without Borders Festival in ME; in Barcelona, Spain; and in Bergen, Norway. Champlin holds an MFA in Intermedia from the University of Maine. She works primarily with generative systems, sound, and biofeedback on themes of communication, interpersonal networks, and agency.
In addition to performance and installation works, she also presents her research and custom interfaces in hands-on workshops and demonstrations of open-source technologies.
Drawing upon an academic background in Critical Methodologies and Japanese/Buddhist Art History, and a professional history in data processing and web technologies, Champlin joined the University of Maine’s Intermedia MFA program in 2015. Much of Champlin’s creative research prior to 2015 centered around pilgrimage, travel, and landscape as ways to communicate identity and make sense of our social environments. Aiming to be more than a tourist, she has visited sacred and secular destinations, followed pilgrimage routes, and taken on the role of pilgrim, seeker, and pathfinder. Many images here document those journeys, and attempt to capture the experiential aspects of locations and icons along the way. A number of the writing samples included speak to the phenomenological aspects of place and movement.
Since then, Champlin’s research & creative practices have come to focus on feedback-driven, generative systems in pursuit of the phenomenological intersection of networked communication and identity. Drawing influence from the provocations of Alvin Lucier, Nam June Paik, Marina Abramovic, and mentor N.B. Aldrich, her work aims to explore cybernetic and post-structuralist issues of communication, such as agency, embodiment and perception, with process-based, interactive methodologies. Champlin completed her MFA in 2018 with a thesis based on these aims, Rediscovering the Interpersonal: Models of Networked Communications in New Media Performance. (University of Maine Digitial Commons)