Aurora Borealis: For Orchestra

This piece explores how our affective response to something, whether properties of music such as harmony or visual phenomena like the Northern Lights, may be mediated by our familiarity with that thing. The same material is presented in two contrasting musical styles: one more contemporary and dissonant while the other is more romantic and consonant. However, whether a listener finds one more appealing than the other may depend on how much experience they have of listening to those different styles.

Aurora Borealis was written to be performed accompanied by a system which takes EEG measurements of an audience member's brain activity and generates a visualisation which changes in real time. An animation of the Northern Lights is projected on a screen, and the stage lighting is also manipulated. The colour of the visuals change according to frontal asymmetry in the listener's brain in the alpha frequency band, which may indicate if their emotions are positive or negative. The colours turn red for relative right activation or negative emotion, and blue for left or positive emotion.

A shorter version of this piece was premiered by the Manchester Contemporary Orchestra at RNCM on January 21st 2026, conducted by Julius Mauldin.