GVU Center Brown Bag: Grace Leslie, "Inner Rhythms: Music Technologies Informed by Perception and Physiology"

Abstract:

The Georgia Tech Brain Music Lab is a community gathered around a unique facility combining EEG (brainwave data) and other physiological measurement techniques with new music technologies. Our mission is to engage in research and creative practice that brings health and well-being. This talk will present an overview of our activities at the Brain Music Lab, including sonification of physiological signals, acoustic design for health and well-being, therapeutic applications of musical stimulation, and brain-body music performance.

Speaker Bio:

Grace Leslie is committed to harnessing the expression granted by new music interfaces to better understand the link between music and emotion, with an ultimate goal of employing musical brain-computer interfaces to promote wellness. She is an assistant professor of Music Technology at Georgia Tech, where she directs the Brain Music Lab.

Previously, Dr. Leslie was a fellow at the Neukom Institute for Interdisciplinary Computation at Dartmouth, where she performed research in the Neurology Group at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center. As a postdoctoral fellow, she worked with the Affective Computing Group at the MIT Media Lab, where she developed musical brain- and body interface systems to invite expression and experience of emotion. On a parallel track, as a flutist and electronic music improviser she maintains a brain-body performance practice. She builds brain-computer interfaces that reveal aspects of her internal mental state, those left unexpressed by sound or gesture, to an audience.

Grace completed her Ph.D. in Music and Cognitive Science at UCSD, where she studied the expressive movements and brain dynamics supporting music engagement at the Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience. During the 2008-2009 year she was a researcher at Ircam in Paris. She has also worked on Audio DSP and User Experience design projects for companies including Sennheiser and Motorola. She completed her undergraduate and Masters work in Music, Science, and Technology at CCRMA, Stanford University.