NIRS Project - an orchestra of 30 participants as a sonic body-territory
NIRS Project - an orchestra of 30 participants as a sonic body-territory
A live orchestra offers one of the strongest images for thinking about the New World.
There is technique.
There is score.
There is precision.
There is apparent hierarchy.
There is a conductor.
There are sections.
There are section leaders.
There is audience.
There is silence.
There is breathing.
There is possible error.
There is emergent beauty.
And, above all, there is a collective body born in the between.
This collective body is the musical Jiwasa.
The orchestra shows that a group can produce order without becoming a machine. It can have leadership without becoming domination. It can have conducting without erasing freedom. It can have technique without losing presence. It can have a score without killing creation.
The conductor, in this sense, appears as a living leadership. He conducts and listens. He guides and receives. He organizes entrances, pauses, intensities, and passages of energy. In some moments, leadership is in him. In others, it passes to the concertmaster. In others, to the strings. In others, to the woodwinds. In others, to the brass. In others, to the percussion. In others, to the silence of the audience.
Leadership circulates.
Authority becomes movement.
The orchestra becomes a living complex system.
This is the primal seed of this experiment.
The orchestra as a wonder of complex systems
In a simple system, command moves from top to bottom.
In a living system, coordination emerges among parts that listen to one another.
The orchestra shows this clearly. The conductor does not play every instrument. He does not produce every sound. He does not replace the bodies of the musicians. He creates conditions for many bodies to produce one single sonic presence.
The function of the conductor is to modulate the field.
He accelerates.
He sustains.
He opens space.
He calls a section.
He holds another.
He gives protagonism.
He gathers excess.
He protects the pause.
He expands the gesture.
He reduces the gesture.
He invites the collective to cross a work.
This leadership comes close to the idea of "the fake boss and true freedom".
Leadership exists, but it operates as a relational function.
The conductor appears as a temporary center of coordination, and not as the owner of the collective body.
This idea dialogues with "The Dawn of Everything", by David Graeber and David Wengrow, a work that questions linear narratives about human history and opens space to imagine more diverse, flexible, and decentralized social forms.
The orchestra, then, becomes metaphor and laboratory.
A metaphor for a New World.
A laboratory of Jiwasa.
The question of the experiment
The NIRS Project asks:
can we measure when an orchestra stops being a sum of musicians and begins to form a sonic body-territory?
This question must be treated with care.
NIRS does not prove Jiwasa by itself.
EEG does not capture the entire spirit of the collective.
Audio does not contain the whole presence.
Video does not see everything.
But together, these signals can open an experimental window.
The goal is to transform Capta into listening.
Capta is captured trace.
Jiwasa is emergent presence.
The experiment does not seek to reduce music to data. It seeks to create a science capable of perceiving when the group gains body, when leadership circulates, when the audience enters the field, and when sound stops being only execution and becomes event.
João Ricardo Sato: a Brazilian bridge between fNIRS, music, and Jiwasa
At this point, the project finds a very important Brazilian bridge: João Ricardo Sato.
João Ricardo Sato is a professor at UFABC and works in Quantitative Methods in Neuroscience, with a trajectory in statistical and computational modeling, neuroimaging, functional and structural mapping of the human brain, time series, biostatistics, and regression models.
This trajectory matters because the NIRS orchestra project needs exactly this bridge: living body, music, neuroimaging, statistics, time series, interaction, and models capable of dealing with many signals at the same time.
Pesquisa FAPESP described a performance conceived by Sato in which music, brain, and education converged, highlighting the use of fNIRS to record multiple brain activities and study musical cognition through neuroscience. The report also explains that fNIRS allows monitoring variations in brain oxygenation while the person is moving, something essential for more natural experiments.
This is very close to our proposal.
The orchestra of 30 participants needs to be studied in movement, listening, breathing, gesture, sound, and risk.
The study "fNIRS Responses in Professional Violinists While Playing Duets", with João R. Sato among the authors, investigated professional violinists playing in duet and found evidence of distinct leader and follower roles at the brain level.
This point is central to our blog-project.
If two violinists can be studied as a living system of leadership, following, listening, gesture, and coupling, then an orchestra can be thought of as the natural expansion of that question.
The conductor would not be only central command.
The conductor would be a modulator of the field.
Section leaders would not be only subordinates.
They would be mobile points of leadership.
Musicians would not be only executors.
They would be sonic body-territories in coupling.
The audience would not be only receiver.
It would be part of the living field of performance.
Another work with João Ricardo Sato, "Hyperscanning fNIRS data analysis using multiregression dynamic models: an illustration in a violin duo", proposed an approach for analyzing fNIRS hyperscanning data, that is, data from multiple brains measured simultaneously. The article uses a violin duo as an illustration and explicitly mentions an orchestra, with musicians and conductor interacting, as a relevant scenario for social neuroscience.
This article offers a direct methodological seed for our experiment.
It helps us think about how the activity of one brain may influence or dynamically associate with the activity of another during interaction. In our language, this opens a path to ask how Capta can begin to listen to Jiwasa.
Also relevant is the work "Hand motor learning in a musical context and prefrontal cortex hemodynamic response", with Sato among the authors. The study used fNIRS to assess prefrontal hemodynamic signals during hand motor learning in a musical context, using a piano chord progression in an ecological experimental environment.
This set of publications shows that the orchestra proposal does not start from zero.
It grows from a Brazilian path already opened by Sato and collaborators:
fNIRS;
interaction;
hyperscanning;
duets;
leadership and following;
musical motor learning;
dynamic analysis of time series;
neuroscience in more natural contexts.
For this reason, João Ricardo Sato should be valued in this project as a researcher capable of helping transform the intuition of musical Jiwasa into an experimental design.
Not to reduce Jiwasa to a graph.
But to create a science where data can serve the listening of the living.
Experimental design: 30 participants
The experiment proposes a reduced orchestra with 30 monitored participants.
Suggested composition:
1 conductor.
4 section leaders, including concertmaster, strings, woodwinds, brass, and percussion.
20 musicians distributed among the sections.
5 audience participants, chosen to represent the living listening of the room.
Total: 30 body-territories.
This formation allows us to observe three levels at the same time:
The individual.
The section.
The collective body of the orchestra with audience.
The goal is to study musical Jiwasa as an emergent pattern among conductor, musicians, sections, audience, acoustic space, and work.
What to measure
The experiment should integrate several layers of Capta.
Proposed measures:
fNIRS/NIRS in selected participants or in all participants, depending on technical feasibility.
EEG in a subgroup, especially conductor, section leaders, and some musicians.
HRV/RMSSD to assess autonomic regulation.
Breathing through respiratory belt or equivalent sensors.
Multichannel audio of the room.
Synchronized video of the orchestra.
Body movement by IMU or visual tracking.
Registration of score events.
Marking of entrances, pauses, leadership shifts, and critical passages.
Post-performance phenomenological reports.
Questionnaires on presence, belonging, risk, listening, and sense of collective body.
This combination allows us to observe how music is born between brain, body, breathing, gesture, sound, and territory.
Experimental conditions
The study can compare different forms of presentation.
Condition 1: recording
The audience listens to a high-quality recording.
Here we measure the stabilized sonic experience.
Recording creates permanence.
Condition 2: live performance without active audience
The orchestra plays in a controlled room, with minimal or absent audience.
Here we observe internal coupling among conductor, leaders, and musicians.
Performance creates coordination.
Condition 3: live performance with audience
The orchestra plays before the 5 monitored audience participants.
Here the field changes.
The room gains social breathing.
The audience enters the system.
Condition 4: centralized leadership
The conductor conducts with high protagonism, more direct gestures, and greater control.
Here we observe the collective body under vertical leadership.
Condition 5: distributed leadership
The conductor passes moments of protagonism to section leaders.
The concertmaster takes a passage.
The strings conduct a transition.
The woodwinds open a color.
The brass create force.
The percussion reorganizes energy.
The conductor becomes less owner of the movement and more modulator of the field.
Here we observe leadership circulating.
This condition is essential for our ideas of New World.
Condition 6: microvariation and consented risk
The orchestra performs a passage with interpretive margin, small consented rhythmic instability, or controlled expressive freedom.
The goal is to observe how the group responds to living risk.
The question is:
when instability appears, does the collective break or reorganize?
Windows of the experiment
The experiment should be analyzed through windows.
Window 1: silence before the entrance
Before the first sound, the collective body has already begun.
The conductor breathes.
The musicians adjust posture.
The audience becomes quiet.
The room waits.
Question:
does the orchestra enter as 30 individuals or as a field in formation?
Window 2: the first gesture of the conductor
The first gesture creates the pact.
The gesture calls time.
It calls body.
It calls listening.
It calls belonging.
Question:
who follows the conductor only as command, and who couples with the field?
Window 3: entrance of the first section
When a section enters, it can carry the collective.
The strings can open territory.
The woodwinds can color emotion.
The brass can create force.
The percussion can reorganize ground.
Question:
how does the body of the orchestra change when a partial leadership assumes the field?
Window 4: leadership passage
This is the heart of the study.
The conductor guides a passage and then gives protagonism to a section leader.
Leadership circulates.
The field reorganizes.
Question:
does synchrony increase when leadership is shared?
Does the breathing of the group come closer?
Does the audience perceive greater presence?
Does Jiwasa intensify?
Window 5: almost-error
A small instability appears.
The group adjusts.
The conductor feels.
The section leader responds.
The audience holds its breath.
Question:
does the possible error create shared attention?
Does vulnerability increase coupling?
Does risk strengthen Jiwasa?
Window 6: climax
At the climax, the orchestra concentrates energy.
Sound, gesture, breathing, and attention become denser.
Question:
is the climax only an increase in volume, or the formation of sonic body-territory?
Window 7: silence after the ending
After the last note, the music continues in the body.
The final silence may be more revealing than the sound.
Question:
does the audience immediately return to the individual, or remain for a few seconds in collective body?
Musical Jiwasa Index
The experiment may propose an exploratory index called the Musical Jiwasa Index.
This index would not be an absolute measure.
It would be a composition of signals.
Possible components:
interbrain synchrony among conductor, leaders, and musicians;
physiological synchrony through HRV and breathing;
acoustic coordination among sections;
temporal stability and flexibility;
dynamics of gaze, gesture, and movement;
audience reaction in HRV, breathing, and reports;
subjective perception of presence, belonging, and collective body;
moments when leadership circulates without loss of cohesion.
Musical Jiwasa appears when many signals point in the same direction:
the group is creating a larger body.
The conductor as a leadership model for the New World
The orchestra teaches a politics.
The conductor can be read as a transitional leadership.
He helps the group cross a work.
He sustains the field.
He distributes attention.
He calls leaders.
He recognizes the moment when another body needs to conduct.
This image comes close to a living State.
A State that recognizes body-territory as the minimum unit.
A State that creates conditions for each territory to express its potency.
A State that coordinates without capturing.
A State that distributes without erasing singularities.
A State that uses technology for belonging.
Here enters Drex Citizen as a technological seed.
The Central Bank of Brazil presents Drex as a central bank digital currency and states that it seeks to democratize access to the benefits of the digital economy, making financial transactions simpler, more efficient, and more secure.
In our reading, retail Drex Citizen can be thought of as a public technology of belonging.
Not only digital money.
But an infrastructure of connection among body-territory, rights, circulation, care, local production, and common future.
The colonized world took monetization to the center of life.
It transformed land into asset.
Attention into product.
Childhood into market.
Art into content.
Future into debt.
The New World needs to place body-territory back at the center.
In this New World, financial technology must serve belonging.
A retail CBDC with Drex Citizen could function as a basis for public policies closer to real life:
territorial income;
local financing;
cultural circuits;
community health;
situated education;
regenerative economy;
valorization of body-territories;
public traces of care;
belonging as infrastructure.
The orchestra helps us imagine this.
The conductor does not own the music.
The State should not own territories.
The conductor creates conditions for sound to emerge.
The State should create conditions for the Weichö of each body-territory to flourish.
From concert to New World
This experiment begins with music.
But its question reaches politics.
The orchestra shows that coordination can be born with freedom.
It shows that leadership can circulate.
It shows that the collective can gain form without erasing singularities.
It shows that technique can serve presence.
It shows that a score can guide without imprisoning.
It shows that possible error can increase attention.
It shows that the audience participates in the sonic body.
It shows that the between is measurable, sensitive, and creative.
The science of NIRS can help reveal part of this between.
The philosophy of Body-Territory can give language.
DNA Intelligence can give vital foundation.
Drex Citizen can give technological infrastructure of belonging.
And Jiwasa can give a name to what emerges when many bodies stop being mass and become common body.
Closing
The NIRS Project with an orchestra of 30 participants proposes more than a music study.
It proposes a rehearsal for the New World.
A world where leadership circulates.
Where the conductor calls potencies.
Where the sections express differences.
Where the audience participates in the field.
Where technology measures without replacing life.
Where data listens to the body.
Where the State learns from the orchestra.
Where digital money can serve belonging.
Where body-territory becomes the minimum unit of politics, economy, and care.
The living orchestra teaches us that the most beautiful collective emerges when each body offers its singularity to the common field.
This common field is Jiwasa.
João Ricardo Sato and his research line help make this hypothesis more concrete. His work with fNIRS, music, hyperscanning, duets, leadership, and analysis of multiple brains offers a Brazilian basis for musical Jiwasa to move beyond philosophical intuition and also become experimental design.
Perhaps the New World begins when we learn to conduct without dominating, measure without reducing, monetize without capturing, and organize without killing the living freedom of body-territories.
Relevant publications and sources to link to the project
Vanzella, P., Balardin, J. B., Furucho, R. A., Zimeo Morais, G. A., Braun Janzen, T., Sammler, D., and Sato, J. R. 2019. "fNIRS Responses in Professional Violinists While Playing Duets: Evidence for Distinct Leader and Follower Roles at the Brain Level". Frontiers in Psychology. This is the study most directly connected to the idea of conductor, leadership, following, coupling, and musical performance with fNIRS.
Nascimento, D. C., Santos da Silva, J. R., Ara, A., Sato, J. R., and Costa, L. 2023. "Hyperscanning fNIRS data analysis using multiregression dynamic models: an illustration in a violin duo". Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience. This article offers a methodological bridge for analyzing multiple brains in interaction and mentions the orchestra as a relevant social scenario for this type of approach.
Heinze, R. A., Vanzella, P., Zimeo Morais, G. A., and Sato, J. R. 2019. "Hand motor learning in a musical context and prefrontal cortex hemodynamic response: a functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) study". Cognitive Processing. This study connects musical motor learning, prefrontal hemodynamic response, and fNIRS in an ecological context.
Pesquisa FAPESP. 2019. "New ways of knowing the brain". The report presents Sato's work with fNIRS, music, education, and the recording of multiple brain activities, offering a strong public narrative to connect science, music, and presence.
Central Bank of Brazil. "Drex". Official source to contextualize Drex as a central bank digital currency and as infrastructure for economic digitalization that, in our reading, can be conceptually expanded toward territorial belonging.
