The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments by Deirdre Loughridge and Thomas Patteson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Shown here is the first page of liner notes to the concept album The Life, Death and Persistence of Captain Charles Fort, by The Wiggly Tendrils. Taking the form of a scientific paper, the liner notes explain the songs on the album to be transmissions received by the song siphon, a device that translates brain activity into songs. Unlike Cadigan’s Brain Sockets or Antares’s Direct Mind Access, however, this is not a mind-machine interface designed to realize its users’ creative intentions; rather, much like an fMRI machine visualizes brain activity, this device songifies it so as to make the data available for observation and analysis. The Wiggly Tendrils are known associates of the Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments curators, though we don’t in fact know which came first – the idea for the song siphon, or for the museum that now houses it.
The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments by Deirdre Loughridge and Thomas Patteson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.