The Sound of Small Brain Cir­cuits: Plas­tic­ity and Syn­chro­ni­sa­tion in the Neu­ro­gran­u­lar Sam­pler

Symposium:

• ISEA2011: 17th International Symposium on Electronic Art
• More presentations from ISEA2011:  

• NeuroArts

• The Sound of Small Brain Cir­cuits: Plas­tic­ity and Syn­chro­ni­sa­tion in the Neu­ro­gran­u­lar Sam­pler

• John Matthias

Venue(s):

• Sabanci Center, Istanbul, Turkey

• Panel: NeuroArts

  The Neu­ro­gran­u­lar Sam­pler is a soft­ware mu­si­cal in­stru­ment de­signed by a col­lab­o­ra­tive team, which trig­gers grains of live sam­pled audio when any one of a net­work of ar­ti­fi­cial spik­ing neu­rons ‘fires’. The level of syn­chro­ni­sa­tion in dis­trib­uted sys­tems is often con­trolled by the strength of in­ter­ac­tion be­tween the in­di­vid­ual el­e­ments. If the el­e­ments are neu­rons in small brain cir­cuits, the char­ac­ter­is­tic event is the ‘fir­ing time’ of a par­tic­u­lar neu­ron. The syn­chrony or de­cou­pling of these char­ac­ter­is­tic events is con­trolled by mod­i­fi­ca­tions in the strength of the con­nec­tions be­tween neu­rons under the in­flu­ence of spike tim­ing de­pen­dent plas­tic­ity, which adapts the strengths of neu­ronal con­nec­tions ac­cord­ing to the rel­a­tive fir­ing times of con­nected neu­rons. In this paper we will show how we can ‘neu­ro­engi­neer’ the col­lec­tive fir­ing be­hav­iour of small net­works of ar­ti­fi­cial neu­rons by ex­ploit­ing spike tim­ing de­pen­dent plas­tic­ity rules in a sonic con­text.

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