Residency

The project at the Nurrish Lab

Stephen Nurrish:

The Nurrish lab is studying how brain cells talk to each other: the release of chemicals from one brain cell to another causing a change in the receiving brain cell. One such chemical in the human brain is called serotonin, and having too little serotonin is thought to lead to abnormal behaviours such as depression, aggression, eating disorders, and alcoholism. If we could better understand what effect serotonin has on brain cells then we could design new, more specific drugs to treat depression. We are investigating how serotonin works using the small nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans. C.elegans also uses serotonin in its much simpler brain (302 cells versus over 10 billion in humans) and we have identified genes that are needed for serotonin's effects in receiving brain cells. These genes are also present in humans. We continue to search for more genes required for serotonin's effects and to understand how the genes we've already found work.

Keith Johnson:

Global brain states of contentedness or depression and their effect on us are powerful and sometimes troubling issues. But for a composer, the idea of how brain states relate to behaviour is enormously intriguing. The mechanism whereby moods or ideas communicate themselves from interior states into external manifestations is a constant source of creative fascination for me. The compositions that arise from the residency will be examine the ideas that drive the scientific research, and also the methods and processes that the scientists use.

Music has long been thought to have privileged access to internal states of being, either as an expression or as a trigger of them. More recently, music has also been seen as somehow instantiating neurological states, rather than simply expressing emotions. There is also a sense in which music possesses an innate physicality, not just because it sometimes makes us want to move and is often necessary for its performance, but because it can have a kind of form that embodies ideas.

These ideas of mental and physical are embodied through the transformations that particular musical tropes and ideas undergo in a particular work. Formulating and clarifying those transformations is one of the basic aims of the music that I write, and is one of the primary ways that I am engaging with the scientific ideas and methodologies. Compositional strategies might include using research data to generate musical results, and using pre-existing musical works as expressive texts that could be altered in analogous ways to the genetic alterations that C. elegans undergoes.