The New Music -- Non Auditory

I had arrived in Nassau last night and after a long day of airports, I turned on the TV to watch the Discovery Channel. A professor from Laurentian University was demonstrating temporal lobe brain stimulation on one of his students. His contention was that we have a "God" spot in our brain. This area of our brain produces the numinous feelings of mysticism when we enter a church or pray. He wanted to demonstrate that it was a local brain effect by using an electromagnet taped to a helmet. This helmet was put onto the test subject in a darkened room. The test subject was wired to an EEG to monitor her brainwaves.

When the electromagnetic brain stimulation was started the girl started seeing images and entities and feeling numinous. This got me to thinking. In our future, our music and iPods have the potential of being the non-auditory kind. In other words, music of the future won't enter our brains through our ears, but rather directly into our brains by stimulating the right part with electro-magnetism.

This stimulation could be of two kinds. The first would be stimulation of memory to re-play songs that we have already heard. This would be like have a personal iPod with no actual musical storage equipment other than your brain.

The second kind of "new" music would be to stimulate the brain to produce pleasant harmonious music within itself, of the kind that you like. It would be a brain synthesizer and a heck of a new musical instruments.

I took violin lessons for five years, and judging by the amount of practice, I think if my violin music cortex were stimulated, you might get about 5 minutes worth of music.