Mitral Transmission
A musician uses heartbeats and body rhythms as the basis for his new album
In a sonic exploration of the human body’s natural rhythms, Greg Fox’s latest album, Mitral Transmission, uses the human heart as the basis for each track.
The Mitral Transmission journey began when Fox, who has formerly drummed for the likes of Dan Deacon and Liturgy, was invited by master jazz drummer and holistic healer, Milford Graves, to experiment with the latter’s self-developed technology. Milford’s innovation is designed with both human health and musicians in mind, encouraging users to follow their own natural rhythms in a quest for heightened wellbeing. By connecting Fox to a computer programmed with custom software, the musicians could hear the music of Fox’s body, which became the basis for the compositions found on the album.
To celebrate the release of Mitral Transmission, Philadelphia's Institute Of Contemporary Art (ICA) is currently hosting Personified, an exhibition which takes the album as a starting point and allows visitors to compose their own music with Fox’s innovation. As well as experimenting with machinery utilised by Fox in the making of his album, visitors can also play with a plant-sonification kit, dubbed Switched-On Garden, recently shared by the musician's label, Data Garden. This project sees plants connected to sensors which let users create sounds from human-to-plant interaction - a great way to round out a memorable experiment in biofeedback and generative music.
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