VART3510 - AkE Internship Journal Week 3 :: New Research Proposal

Great meeting with Dr Eva Cheng last week. She is quite helpful and keen to assist us with our research. We discussed the scope of the research falling within the scope of a LIEF grant and have avenues to pursue the research in house with Antonio Paolini (Prof. Psych at Bundoora campus) or with Adrian Dyer.

Further correspondence between Eva and Darrin suggest that Eva is interested in incorporating the research into her 'Quality of Mulitmedia Experience' branch of research work which is exciting!

By suggestion from Darrin I read the following paper to explore the artistic scope of our research as we are approaching this from the School of Art.


Reedijk, S., Bolders, A. & and Hommel, B. (2013) The impact of binaural beats on creativity, Frontiers in Neuroscience




During the week Darrin and I decided to abandon Binaural beat brainwave entrainment as the basis of our research for the reason that due to the current literature there is a very small scope to explore the artistic/creative relevance of brainwave activity. By abandoning this we open ourselves up to the exploration of brainwave activity without consideration to the confounding literature exploring the legitimacy of the causal relationship between auditory cues and FFR EEG response.

We both agreed that an artistic foundation to the research would be most appropriate, with sound art as basis for investigation in a psychological context feeling the best way forward.

I altered our research proposal to accommodate a goal that explores whether musical compositional formatting is processed differently by the brain than compositions that would typically be considered "sound art."

Darrin and I both agree this feels like a more natural academic pursuit from the School of Art and opens up further research opportunities based on the findings we will go on to observe.

New Research Proposal:

Observation and recording of brainwave activity changes in response to a range of musical and soundscape compositions in order to examine whether a conventional musical framework is a significant component in the neural response to composed sonic stimuli. Participants will be played pieces of atonal music, noise music, soundscape & stochastic music in contrast to more conventional musical compositions such as pop, rock, jazz & classical. Responses to the stimuli will be measured via EEG.