The Meeting of Musical Minds

Spring 2025
By Katharine Shilcutt
Photos by Brandon Martin

In October 2024, classical music fans at Houston’s Miller Outdoor Theatre were treated to a concert unlike any other seen on the stage at Hermann Park. During a performance of Anthony Brandt’s “Diabelli 200” by Musiqa, both the conductor and pianist wore mobile brain-body imaging caps that captured their EEG data, which was displayed live on a large screen above the orchestra in visualizations created by multimedia artist Badie Khaleghian.

As the chamber musicians played, the audience could see exactly how the brains of the conductor and pianist were responding not just to hearing the music but to the act of directly performing and engaging with it.
 

“Neuroscience has learned more about the human brain from music than any other human activity, and one of the reasons is it literally uses every part of our brain, from physical motion to memory to emotion to the feedback loop between perception and action,” says Brandt, who teaches composition and music theory at Rice’s Shepherd School of Music and is artistic director of contemporary chamber music ensemble Musiqa. “All of those things are engaged by music, and so it is an incredible resource for science — for understanding our inner lives.”

Brandt has long worked with the University of Houston’s BRAIN Center, led by biomedical engineer Jose Contreras-Vidal, to develop new interfaces that allow the brain to communicate directly with external devices like robots, exoskeletons or prosthetic devices like the EEG caps developed by Contreras-Vidal and his team.

The “Diabelli 200” collaboration, inspired by Beethoven’s “Diabelli Variations,” marked the first time a conductor wore full-scale neuroimaging equipment during a live performance, but Brandt and Contreras-Vidal have conceived other performances together, including one that debuted at the United Nations’ AI for Good Global Summit in May 2024.

Presented in Geneva, Switzerland, their “Meeting of Minds” was a blend of choreography, dance and scientific experiment. Once again, an audience was able to see how dancers’ brains responded throughout the performance through visualizations designed by Khaleghian, a doctoral candidate in composition at the Shepherd School, that deciphered live data from their EEG caps.
 

“The first generation of neuroscience was essentially about figuring out what all brains have in common,” says Brandt. “But in the process of doing that, scientists discovered that actually, brains are incredibly impacted by culture and experience, and the arts are one of the most exceptionally powerful and revealing ways of studying that.”

Recently, Brandt traveled to Indonesia thanks to funding from Rice’s Medical Humanities Research Institute to investigate how traditional gamelan music and dance interacts with the mind, using those same EEG caps.

“Tony’s project is so exciting because he’s doing research that brings music and neuroscience together. One of his great insights is that music is very culturally specific, but a lot of neuroscience treats Western European classical music as if it’s universal,” says Kirsten Ostherr, the founding director of the MHRI. 

“This is all part of a larger undertaking to understand the role of culture in how brains respond to music, creativity and other forms of stimulation, which could have all kinds of important impacts on understanding music as a tool for therapy, for regenerative medicine and just for understanding how the brain works,” Ostherr says. 

Kirsten Ostherr is the Gladys Louise Fox Professor of English in the School of Humanities and director of the Medical Humanities Program and the Medical Humanities Research Institute at Rice. Anthony Brandt is professor of composition and music theory at Rice’s Shepherd School of Music and the artistic director of Musiqa. Jose Contreras-Vidal is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Houston.