Thought Conductor #2: June 2000, Stavanger Konserthus, Norway. Presented as part of Speculum Combi IBCA 2000 by Bruce Gilchrist and Jonny Bradley.
An invitation from the Speculum Combi IBCA 2000 Festival provided the impetus to further develop the Thought Conductor concept, this time integrating the database principle originally conceived for "Divided By Resistance". Several weeks before the performance at the Stavanger Konserthus, Gilchrist and Bradley were resident at Studio Struts in Oslo, to collaborate with a number of Oslo Based composers. Twelve composers in all were invited to the studio and asked to write spontaneous compositions for a string quartet. While writing the musical notation, their EEG was recorded. At the end of this process, the recorded EEG file was associated with a midi version of their notation and archived within a database. For the Stavanger Konserthus performance, 4 members of the community were invited on stage and connected to the biomonitor. They were then asked to think of their last creative act. In the event, a bricklayer mentally recollected building a brick wall; a jeweller thought about a gold ring he had recently made; a yogi meditated; a painter imagined the process of making her last painting. Each 'thought conductor' generated original scores from the notation within the relational database, each part of which was sent to laptops for the string quartet to sight read and play.
