MOTOR OVERFLOW

Music by Motor Overflow uses principles of human functional brain organization derived from scientific research to engage specific localized areas and distributed systems in the brain of the listener. Neurons in different regions of the brain have different receptive field properties; they fire in response to receiving different kinds of information from the outside world. For example, right primary auditory cortex shows faster and higher amplitude responses to simple and artificial tones like sinusoidal waveforms, while left primary auditory cortex shows faster and higher amplitude neural activity to natural, more complex sounds, such as human speech. While neurons in primary sensory regions code the incoming low-level physical properties of sounds, such as amplitude and duration, neural activity and its organization downstream is driven by increasingly contextual and abstract properties of music as it moves through the hierarchy of cerebral functional organization.

​

At long time intervals, the human brain recognizes and encodes forms of novelty and repetition in the auditory stream, both of which contribute to the perception of a specific piece of music as being pleasing, strange, surprising, exciting, soothing, raucous, dissonant, nostalgic, and the like. Music that is simple, predictable, and conforms strongly to traditional conventions (such as in time signatures, chords progressions, rhythmic complexity, and phrase cycles), though often pleasing and sometimes preferred, will fail to forge new neural pathways and fail to engage new networks in the listener as compared to music that is more novel, less predictable, and more information-rich. Much modern popular music, even when it's new to your ears, fails to take advantage of the neurophysiological fact that complexity, dissonance, and dyssynchrony will be better at driving novel brain activity patterns and can produce new pleasures of listening unobtainable by overly familiar, predictable, and conventional sounds, chord progressions, rhythms, and structures.

​

Motor Overflow uses this still-growing scientific understanding about the cognitive neuroscience of musical processing to create music that gives the listener a unique biosonic experience, driving novel brain engagement patterns, from low-level sensory cortex to tertiary, transmodal, and prefrontal cortex; subcortical motor loops; emotion-processing limbic structures and reward circuits; and higher order cognitive and intellectual systems. Music created in a neuroscientifically informed way can expand the listener's mind viscerally and cerebrally.

​

​

Warning: Listening to Motor Overflow may induce involuntary movements of the digits, extremities, and limbs and has been known to cause near-dance experiences.