Although we all connect with music in one way or another, it's an enigma why we like it and why it causes us emotions. It is still a bigger mystery to understand why there are people with a special talent for creating it.

In this journey to the musical brain, we learn about the creative process of two very different creators from Barcelona: Mans O and Rob Clouth, and we find out how our brain gives emotional meaning to music with the neuroscientist and IDIBELL researcher Antoni Rodríguez Fornells.

Mans O (Roman Daniel Esteba), musician and New Trends Professor at Elisava,  brings us close to his creative process in his talk “Institución Intuición” (Institution Intuition), a survey of intuition as an engine for the creative process and a generator for coherence in the vital practice. He draws attention –through a metaphoric lens– to the dynamics of nature, through which he introduces us to some of his applied fractal creative techniques. For the first time, he reveals his improvisation methodology, in which he emphasizes the complementarity between innovation and preservation, maintaining a delicate attention to collective energy and its confrontation with the structures of market and power.

Rob Clouth, musician and renowned music software developer, presents “Digital Luthiery”, or how technical and artistic methodologies that are often seen as opposed in nature, really are just two sides of the same coin: both can be creative.
Using tech in music can sometimes be an interruption of the creative flow, but used correctly it can shorten the mind-computer loop, capturing your intention and amplifying it. He demonstrates some of the ways in which state-of-the-art tech and music can be combined for quickly getting ideas out of your head into the computer, and through live performance hope to demonstrate the power of this unified approach.

Antoni Rodríguez Fornells, cognitive neuroscientist (researcher at ICREA, Catalan Institute for Research and Advanced Studies) and researcher at IDIBELL (Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute) presents the lecture “How the brain gives emotional meaning to music”. One of the mysteries associated with music is its privileged capacity to trigger emotions and pleasurable feelings. The question we want to tackle here is how our brain is able to decode music into this rich landscape of emotional and motivational experiences. Mr. Rodriguez Fornells shows the most recent findings from the field of neuroscience applied to understand how pleasure and emotions are induced by music and its potential impact during all our life and overall in our well-being.  


The lecture by Antoni Rodríguez Fornells is supported by Ajuntament de L’Hospitalet.