Animal Collective - Transverse Temporal Gyrus

Yesterday, Animal Collective announced a new piece called Transverse Temporal Gyrus. It is a collaboration between the ever-progressive Animal Collective and artist Danny Perez that will be a site-specific performance at the Guggenheim for the New York museum's 50th Anniversary. As mentioned on the description page here (where you can also buy tickets starting tomorrow), the piece will transform the museum's rotunda into a kinetic, psychedelic environment.

Here is the purpose of Transverse Temporal Gyrus as described by Animal Collective:

"One of the things that you notice almost immediately in the jungle are the birds; so many different sounds coming from so many different directions. Are they communicating to each other? What are they saying? Does each variation serve a purpose? Why are there repetitions? Is there a pattern or is that just your imagination? If you don’t know the first thing about bird songs, these questions can rack a brain for days. The jungle seems louder than most New York apartments but its symbiosis makes it subtler if not more pleasing to foreign ears. The longer you sit awake in bed listening at night, the more you hear...

But as the environments around us change quickly, as people encroach more and more on land where only select symbioses occur, we wonder how this will change the sounds around us and how this alters the way we hear things and react to them. As New Yorkers we are all familiar with the everyday noise around us—the car alarms, the subway trains braking, the music in bars—so familiar that sometimes we drown them out. But then do we not realize how these sounds are affecting us? How they make us feel or act? With this in mind we wanted to create an environment where people could take some time to listen to other kinds of sounds and get away from those familiar sounds of the city. Keeping in mind the birds of the jungle, we’ve created an array of sounds with Animal Collective's music that is seemingly random...or is it? We invite you to come take some time out and sit with us. As time passes it is our hope that you will wonder if you are hearing songs or patterns or maybe simply hearing more. The visual work of Danny Perez has been incorporated to turn the environment of an empty museum into a more mysterious hideaway. The core elements and colors are worked into the piece in order to unite this room of sound with the inside of your brain. We hope you enjoy."

So there you have it...Interesting to note that a transverse temporal gyrus, circled as #41 in the brain map above, is one of two gyri found in the primary auditory cortex on both sides of the brain. It is the first piece of neural tissue to process incoming auditory information. I am close to booking a ticket to this as I would thoroughly enjoy these transverse temporal Gurus and their aural/visual experiment. When you close your eyes, do you still hear? When you cover your ears, do you still see? The answer is yes, but the fact remains that you would experience those senses individually of each other if one was completely absent (unless you have synesthesia). Some sights do not have sounds, and some sounds do not have sights. It will be interesting to see how they have set up the sights and sounds of their creation to communicate with each other because as we know, Animal Collective are capable of unmeasurable creativity. Here is their offical video for Brother Sport: