This week at Lancaster Arts Centre the UK the premiere of groundbreaking new technology that lets people look inside a pianist's mind as they play took place. Neurorecital saw pianist Nicolas Namoradze perform music by Bach, Debussy, and Scriabin, accompanied by a video projection of his brain activity. The different musical styles produce strikingly different brain visuals, giving insight into what it’s like to perform each piece. It was developed by Neuroscape, the University of Calgary, Honens, and Nicolas himself, and is the first technology of its kind. Nicolas is well-placed to discuss both the music and technology. He studied at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology, and Neuroscience at King’s College, London and created IDAGIO’s programme on music and cognitive science. Group Editor Andrew Palmer spoke to him about the project.

What was it like having your brain monitored while performing? Did the recording process affect your playing at all?

It was a pretty surreal experience! We were all amazed by how sensitive the technology was to many parameters of my performance — the imaging team could even tell, based on my brainwaves, that my brain was getting tired towards the end of each (very long) recording day. Despite the discomfort of wearing the EEG cap for 9 hours straight each day and having to sit very still while recording, I did still manage to feel pretty comfortable while performing.

What surprised you most about seeing your own brain activity visualised during performance?

We were all astonished by just how active the brain was during piano playing; it’s really a full-brain workout. Not only did we see plenty activity in the regions typically associated with music (like the auditory cortex) — all of the brain was lighting up in a real fireworks display.

How do the brain patterns differ between Bach, Debussy, and Scriabin - and what does this tell us about how we process different musical styles?

There were lots of fascinating differences. Bach led to lots of activity back and forth between the prefrontal and motor cortices, pointing to a lot of coordination involved in balancing complex textures in his music. In some expansive Debussy preludes the brain looks a lot calmer, whereas in Scriabin my occipital lobe (associated with visual processing) was lighting up especially prominently, which is fascinating given that Scriabin had synesthesia; it’s almost as if his own strong visual imagination comes through his music and affects those who perform his music too.

Given your background in neuroscience, what insights did this project give you that you couldn't have predicted?

The project confirmed our hypothesis that the brain will look different depending on what music we play, in a manner that is really palpable even while just watching the visualizations, without reading the analyses. What we were all most surprised and heartened by was the strength of the correlation of these patterns across repeated recordings of each work, which validated our very new methodology.

How does performing with brain visualisations change the audience experience compared to a traditional recital?

It gives a different kind of insight, looking 'inside' the performer’s mind rather than just at them. Of course, this music needs no further explanation, but the added visual dimension tells a really engaging story that is wonderful to follow along with while listening to this music.

Do you think this technology reveals something new about musical interpretation, or does it confirm what musicians already know intuitively?

There’s a lot that the technology confirmed and translated into a new visual form, but there are also plenty of new and surprising insights (such as the visual activation in the Scriabin mentioned earlier). This is really encouraging, as this is novel technology and the research we’ve done so far is essentially a case study — we’re only at the very first stages of exploring its potential for further research and application.

Glass Brain still 1 credit Ted Zanto, Roger Anguera and Adam Gazzaley, Neuroscape, UCSF

Will seeing your brain activity influence how you approach these pieces in future performances?

I think getting a clearer idea of a performer’s neural activity might be useful in refining how we practice these pieces — the better we understand the pathways and brain patterns involved, the more efficiently we can work in this direction. The exchange between neuroscience and performance psychology has been a very fruitful one, and hopefully this research will contribute to the conversation.

How did this collaboration between musicians, neuroscientists, and technologists come about?

A while back I’d had the idea to simply create some kind of short film which shows a visualization of my neural activity while performing a certain piece of music. This gradually evolved into a collaboration with Neuroscape at UCSF, the creators of the Glass Brain technology, and then grew into a larger venture in partnership with the University of Calgary, Steinway & Sons, Honens and a few other partners as further potential avenues emerged — including not just the recital format but installations, research projects and a number of forthcoming initiatives.

What were the biggest challenges in developing this technology?

The core of the technology had existed before the Neuropiano project, but was considerably refined for this initiative. The methodology was in fact more of a question than the technology itself — its application to musical performance was very problematic, as temporally identical repeated recordings are necessary for analysis and data processing. Thus it’s very easy to create visualizations of someone listening to a piece of music (the test subject just listens to the same recording many times over while being scanned with an EEG, creating several recordings of neural activity perfectly aligned in timing that one can then process). I then came up with the idea of using the Steinway Spirio, a new and highly refined player piano — I would play each piece once “properly”, have it recorded by the piano itself, and then the repeated performances would involve me playing the piano along with the instrument’s own playback, with my fingers moving in tandem with the piano depressing the keys — a bit like “finger-syncing”. I got very much used to the process, so much so that I’d forget I wasn’t really playing. Through this we ended up with the temporally identical repeat recordings that then could yield such data of unprecedented clarity for musical performance.

Where do you see this technology heading - could it become a regular part of musical performance?

I imagine the recital format will remain a very experimental concept for a while! The concert format is the live presentation version of an initiative that will have many different prongs, and the greatest potential for the technology here is likely in its application to research.

What drew you from neuroscience into professional piano performance, and how do these worlds complement each other in your work?

Neuroscience has been just a hobby of mine, especially during the pandemic when performing slowed down — at the time I had recently won the Honens International Piano Competition, and was in the middle of a hectic touring schedule when everything ground to a halt. All of a sudden I had the time to pursue a few interests I otherwise wouldn’t have managed to delve into! I had been reflecting on the process of piano playing from a number of different angles, looking at the big picture and really considering all the aspects involved — this got me into thinking more about mental practice, which led me to performance psychology, and eventually I followed this thread down the rabbit hole and got interested in the neural dimensions of playing an instrument.

What do you hope audiences will take away from experiencing a "neurorecital"?

I hope audiences will get not only a novel and enriching perspective on what it means for our brains to play music — and how music affects the mind, generally speaking — but also have experienced these extraordinary musical works in new ways. A response I keep receiving about the recital format is that audiences in fact it very moving: there’s an emotional dimension in witnessing the performer’s inner landscape in this way, and the visualizations tell a such an interesting story.

Could this technology help music education or therapy in the future?

Absolutely, this is where we see the greatest potential from a research perspective. We’ve long known that there are few things as beneficial for brain development as playing music, especially the piano as it is such a complex activity in terms of coordination. The more concretely we can see how the brain responds to music — and how specific musical parameters activate and develop different brain regions — the better we can advocate for music education and refine music therapies.

Why was Lancaster Arts chosen for the UK premiere?

This isn’t the first time I’m working with Lancaster Arts in fact — we’ve collaborated before and they’re a wonderful organization that presents meaningful and thought-provoking music and theatre in the region. The last time I was here for a recital we’d had a conversation about my interests in the cognitive sciences, and how we might collaborate on such a project down the line given the presence of an excellent neuroscience department at the university here. It thus felt very fitting to give the UK premiere at Lancaster University as part of this series.