The Mind Body Problem

Artist and composer Robin Meier Wiratunga explores how humans, insects, swarms and machines think. Blending techniques from both sound and science, he creates experimental compositions involving singing mosquitoes, synchronised fireflies, metronomes, ants, neural networks and instrumentalist pigeons. In collaboration with scientists and laboratories, he brings together artificial and animal intelligence to make music emerge from complex systems.

Birds dream. They dream in songs and melodies that they may later sing in waking life. This scientific discovery forms the starting point for an artistic research project that Meier Wiratunga is developing with neuroscientists and ethologists. In this collaboration, the aim is to make bird dreams audible. By comparing the brain activity of a singing bird with that of a dreaming one, an algorithm decodes and reconstructs imagined sonic fragments from the sleeping bird’s mind. Positioned at the intersection of neurobiology, artificial intelligence and the sound of dreams, the project also raises broader questions – about animal perception of time, the embodied nature of consciousness and how reality is constructed.