This Sunday evening at the Cultural Center’s Yates Gallery, Chicago Symphony Orchestra cellist Katinka Kleijn will play more than her usual instrument—she’ll be wearing an EPOC Neuroheadset, an electroencephalography (EEG) device whose 14 sensors connect with the scalp and pick up brain waves. Retailing for $299, it’s designed largely for gamers, but Kleijn will use it to give the world premiere of Intelligence in the Human-Machine, a new duet for cello and brain waves composed by Daniel R. Dehaan in collaboration with Ryan Ingebritsen. (It’s a commission by art duo Industry of the Ordinary, aka Adam Brooks and Matthew Wilson, for an ongoing retrospective at the Cultural Center called Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.) With the headset on, Kleijn may look like she’s indulging in Jetsons-style retrofuturism, but the piece is no joke—and neither is the EPOC. It might get laughed out of a laboratory, but it does work.
The earliest discussions were about trying to use a lie detector. “We got into the idea of trust and sincerity,” says Kleijn. “Do the musicians really trust the conductor? Is there really something meaningful and real, or is it just show? We wanted to document some kind of communication.” In January 2012 Kleijn enlisted the help of sound designer and composer Ingebritsen and, later, composer Dehaan. As it turned out, they could neither afford a proper lie detector nor find a good way to manipulate one musically; Ingebritsen recalled that under certain circumstances electroencephalography could be pressed into service for the same purpose, so the team switched gears.
Kleijn has been trying to sharpen her control of those mental states through meditation. “I’ve been practicing every day, and even though it’s only for about ten minutes, it has helped,” she says. “One thing we’ve discovered that’s really interesting is that if I play something extremely difficult, the ‘meditation’ line goes up. I think it could be that the music was so difficult that I could only think of one thing, playing the music.”
Sun 1/13, 7:30 PM, Yates Gallery, Chicago Cultural Center, free, all ages
