The mysterious cerebral-vascular accident of Dr. Lowry This talk will follow the development of a new orchestral work, Cortical songs 2 (written with Nick Ryan) which is focused on auditory phantom perception, or tinnitus. I will describe the vanishing tinnitus of Dr Louis Lowry, following a stroke in August 2000 and the subsequent experiments of Paul Larson and steven Cheung, who modulated several patients’ tinnitus by applying Deep Brain stimulation to the same area of the brain which was damaged in Dr Lowry’s stroke. I will also describe work carried out with Martine hamann and co-workers in which we model and sonify the change in excitability in parts of the auditory system following exposure to loud sounds. The compositional process, already underway, uses neuronal firing patterns associated with the changing excitability in the auditory system, ideas about the awareness of auditory phantoms via a part of the brain usually associated with motor function and a player-piano to produce the music, which will be premiered in London in November.
