A navigable sonic art installation by Julie Freeman based on fMRI data. Part of the Tricks of the Psych Trade event.

An art installation based on brain scan data obtained from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies, conducted with both healthy volunteers and people diagnosed with Aspergers Syndrome. The software manipulates any set of co-ordinates (in this instance those gathered during fMRI studies to indicate brain regions with elevated levels of activation during specific tasks) to generate interesting and unique audio outputs generated from recordings of emotive sounds both within nature and the human voice.

In Sound Mind is a navigable sonic space – layers of sound fade in and out, moving between dense complex auditory sound and simple aural clarity. As the audience move through the sound slices, they will begin to discover that through their own movement they can subtract the unwanted noise and find the auditory signal that they prefer – a physical manifestation of the technique used in fMRI studies to isolate brain activation specific to a particular task.

Part of the Tricks of the Psych Trade event sponsored by The British Psychological Society.