Andrew Staniland has spent nearly a decade developing JADE, an electronic instrument that transforms biological data into music. The Canadian composer's latest album, The Laws of Nature, showcases the instrument's most compelling capability: converting dancers' brainwaves into sound. Working with six dancers from Kittiwake Dance Theatre, Staniland invited them to become both performers and instruments, their neural activity influencing the music they heard in real time. The result is somewhere between ambient texture and the structured complexity of electroacoustic composition.
Staniland, a professor at Memorial University who founded the Memorial Electroacoustic Research Lab (MEARL), sees JADE as a tool that eliminates the absence of a nuanced physical connection between performer and instrument. His creation of an instrument capable of reading EEG data, heart rate, and environmental conditions—and the album's spatial audio mix—places listeners inside the recursive feedback loop between dancers and their own neural patterns.
The Laws of Nature sidesteps the usual debates about technology in music. Rather than replacing human creativity, JADE amplifies unconscious creative processes that performers cannot directly control. The dancers influence their sound by moving, thinking, and breathing, but they have no control over what they will hear. This unpredictability creates what Staniland calls a "subconscious" approach to music making, where the performer taps into creative currents usually hidden beneath conscious intention. The artifacts and interruptions of the technology are also represented, including moments where the EEG headband loses contact with a dancer's skin and the music simply stops.
In my interview with Andrew Staniland, we discuss Staniland’s background as a metal guitarist turned experimental composer, the collaborative process with Kittiwake Dance Theatre, and how he deploys spatial audio mixing. We also explore the potential therapeutic applications of JADE technology and consider how it differs from current AI-driven music creation tools.
Lawrence Peryer: I'd like to start with The Laws of Nature. I wonder if you could tell me about the emotional reactions you had the first time you heard a dancer's brainwaves transformed into music.
Andrew: Oh, one hundred percent excitement. And the feedback loop of the dancers hearing themselves and me making a change, and then them responding positively or neutrally or even negatively, and then changing it again was pretty exciting.
Lawrence: How would you characterize their collective experience?
Andrew: They were all very happy to be involved at the granular level, prior to any composition. They were great collaborators. There was zero expectation coming into the project. We didn't know if it was going to be amazing or laborious. But they were great collaborators for sure.
Lawrence: Were you thinking of it as an experiment?
Andrew: I think you're always prepared for failure when you take these things on. But early on in the sessions, I knew something good was going to happen from it, and I think they did, too.
Lawrence: I'm curious about what drew you to the idea of using the EEG technology and the dancers. What's the origin story?
Andrew: I'm principally a composer. I write music, and I've developed this interest in digital instruments because of this chasm that exists between performance with traditional instruments—violin or cello, guitar even—and digital stuff.
I'd been down this path for a while, and it was going really well. Then I had this moment to reflect, and I thought, could I put all my interests in the same room to see what would happen? Those interests were composition, digital instruments, and mindfulness. What would happen if you put those three things in the room and let them mix?
That's the origin story of the JADE. The JADE instrument has three modes of making music, the third of which is the biosensor mode, which is where the EEG comes in. We also tried heart rate monitors, which were very interesting.
Lawrence: Could you tell me more about your drive to create new instruments rather than just to compose for existing ones?
Andrew: There's almost an infinite availability of virtual instruments, plugins, virtual stuff. If you subscribe to Native Instruments as I do, you have at your fingertips thousands of incredible instruments.
I think what's really missing and what everybody really wants in digital music making is that feeling of relationship between your body and an instrument. A guitar is a great example. It's a piece of wood with some steel strings in your hands, and it's not maybe much when you think about it, but look at the depth of expression that's available. I think that depth is something that's missed in the digital milieu because we have thousands, tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of patches and presets, and software we can go to. But where's the nuance of performance where you can get that intimacy with a small set of options to create infinite possibilities?
Lawrence: So, it's instrument as interface, an expressive interface into the technology.
Andrew: I think that's right. That's a good paraphrase, and I think that's what's missing in digital instruments. When you ask somebody, "Tell me about electronic instruments with physicality,” they will say the theremin and maybe the Ondes Martenot, but there are hundreds of other instruments from the early twentieth century that never really went anywhere. Only a few of them take off and are known to us today. I really think it's the lack of nuance, the lack of depth. It's "Okay, I can squeeze this thing, and it'll do that. What's next?"
Lawrence: The interesting thing with JADE and the EEG mode is that you're not driving it with the same kind of deliberate musical control because you can train yourself to a certain extent to have a peak of a certain type of brain wave at a certain time, but you're not really in control of it. It's almost a subconscious thing.
Andrew: And that's interesting to listen to, and that's interesting to play with. I think you'll hear that a lot when you talk to creative people about how they write music. "How do you write these great songs?" And they'll often have an answer like, "Man, I just reach out into the ether and I tap into the magic and it comes to me." It's a hands-off approach that's a common trope.
Lawrence: You mentioned wanting to bring mindfulness into this. Tell me about how that comes into the artistry.
Andrew: I discovered mindfulness around the time that it was becoming part of the zeitgeist. I signed up to Headspace and I've been on the road ever since. But I think what I love most about it as a creative person is this notion that what you're looking for is already here.
You don't need to make the piece. You simply need to quiet things down so that you can see the piece that is already there. Almost like you can pull up the page of the manuscript and, "Oh, actually the music's already written. I just need to be open to it." That's a big part of how I see creativity.
You're tapping into a real collective currency of what music is, and when it all is feeling good and going well, that's what it feels like. So maybe there's an intersection there between the brainwave work and composition generally.
Lawrence: When you talk to people who do applied creativity or innovative work in other fields like technology and the sciences, there is a similar grasping at the way ideas arrive. The tapping into, the being delivered, the revelation, to the point where it seems metaphysical. It seems like a fact of the human condition that this is how these things work.
Andrew: I think that's spot on for sure.
Lawrence: Can you tell me what happens when the dancer puts on the headband? What are you measuring, and how does that data get transformed into musical material?
Andrew: I originally thought I could take data from the Apple Watch or the Garmin watch, such as heart rate variability. It turns out it was basically totally inaccessible. They have whole proprietary systems, and we ended up making our own heart rate monitors that have just lights, which worked very well.
We then found this incredibly capable EEG headband called the Muse Headband, which is commercially available. They have a very developer-friendly software development community. So you can get right into the data itself. It's got five sensors across the brow. This proved very effective for getting data into the computer to make music with it.
Once you have some data that's moving up and down at a certain rate, there are a lot of choices that are made. For instance, the human ear can hear between twenty and twenty thousand hertz approximately. So you sometimes have to transpose the data into an audible range. Maybe it's a sine tone that's going up and down, but you could assign that between one hundred and two hundred hertz, or you can assign it between twenty and twenty thousand hertz, where you're going to get incredible artistic results pretty much immediately.
Then further, if you decide to quantize the data, you can step into, say, a major scale or a minor scale, or a Phrygian scale, or a Dorian scale. Those things have an emotional impact immediately. The dancers really responded to these subtle changes. "Let's hear you as a drum kit. Let's hear you as an arpeggiated synthesizer." And you could really feel when it was good because they would begin to move because that's what they do. They want to dance, and it was amazing to see that feedback loop.
Lawrence: The dancers could cycle through what they would sound like and find what resonates.
Andrew: Yeah, definitely. There was a logistical problem that came up because the band needs to maintain contact with the skin. As there was more movement, it would interrupt. So that became an interesting glitch. Sometimes on the record, you'll hear music will simply stop and resume. Sometimes that was actually the disconnect and reconnect of the actual data, which I thought was cool. Really embracing the mistakes of the technology was instrumental in this piece.
Lawrence: Could you tell me about the relationship between the dancers improvising, the direction you gave them, cues, composition—what was going on there?
Andrew: There were six dancers. We worked with each one in a different session, and sometimes it would go immediately. Sometimes we would experiment a lot. In some cases, for each dancer, I would have twenty, thirty minutes of stuff to work with. A few of them actually chose to sit very calmly and think about movement, which was very cool. So they would go through some steps in a choreography they had performed, but not physically, but just in the mind and visualization, which was super interesting.
I'm selecting a little bit of what came out of each one of their sessions and trying to keep the raw aspect of it. We can't call it raw because so many decisions have been made to that point. Is there a tonality to it? Is it a big range? Is it a small range? Is it fast? Is it slow? But I tried to keep the raw aspect of it, and I think that did come through.
Lawrence: It's not dissimilar from the way a lot of creative music albums are made in terms of taking improvisation and using editing and processing after the fact to create new works.
Andrew: For sure. I was just listening to an interview today with Jon Batiste, discussing his new album, and he was saying that he recorded most of the tracks live with minimal editing to cut through the noise of this ability we have now to edit forever.
That really resonated with me—there's something magic that happens in a process-driven piece where you're not actually filtering the process. You let the process show a little bit. You let them see your tools, you let them see the artifacts and the dust that are left because of the tools you chose.
Lawrence: Tell me about your choice to work with spatial audio. When does the fact that something's going to be mixed in Atmos influence any of the decisions you're making during the actual creation?
Andrew: I think at the heart of that is "Let's please find a way to make digital music special again." That's what Atmos is to me. It is a promise. It's "Oh my gosh, this could be amazing. This is an advantage, not a disadvantage." There's really a lot to be gained, especially in creative music to mix in this space, and you just have this opportunity to make clarity in an otherwise pretty busy texture.
When I conceptualized the piece, I sent the stems over to my colleague John Adams, who's a brilliant sound engineer. John worked with John Cage and Merce Cunningham in New York for a long time, who were both pioneers in EEG music way back in the day. John really gets the experimental music aesthetic.
I delivered him raw audio with almost like an orchestral direction, saying, "There are eighteen or sometimes twenty-four parts, and here's how I see them in space." I articulated to him on a 2D space, as I was thinking about it, and he mixed it into this Atmos world, which is just—I still can't believe it.
Lawrence: I spoke with an archivist for a major artist and the comment he gave me was that no one's making native immersive music yet. I think that's the thing that's been very interesting in the jazz and creative music worlds, is that those artists are starting to embrace the possibility of the format.
Andrew: It's pretty divisive. I have people that are really strongly against it, especially when you grow up on Zeppelin and the Who—they mastered the stereophonic space.
Lawrence: You can go back even further. Even the Beatles never approved any stereo masters of their albums until Abbey Road and Let It Be. To the Beatles, the Beatles are mono.
Andrew: That's crazy to think about.
Lawrence: To your point, the artists were mastering the technology of their time. To pivot a little bit—it's hard not to look at your formative years as a metal guitarist. What do you still have with you from those years?
Andrew: A lot of the people I collaborate with are classically trained people. They come through the conservatory. They have chops to burn. They go through this incredible gauntlet of selection and have careers, and what most of them don't have—I don't know what the proportion is, eighty percent, ninety percent, maybe—they don't have that permission to tinker with things. To create, to just try some stuff.
Everybody who comes through the route I came through—the way I came to music, through guitar, through bands, through metal—if you don't create your own stuff, you don't make it, you don't even get to day one. We're all making our own stuff. Everybody's making riffs, trying things out, and working collaboratively in a band, and nothing's really sacred. Things are malleable in a way that classical people don't learn.
In fact, a lot of classical people that I take in my own studio, they have this sort of apprehension that composition is only for great people, great minds, great composers, and "I'm not that. So I will not be composing. Thank you very much." When you come at it from where I came from, it's the opposite. Everybody's writing, everybody's making, and so that freedom, that sort of carte blanche to say "I'm a creative artist and I can change anything I want. Thanks very much. Please fuck off.”—we take it for granted. That's the most important thing. And also, collaborative music making, writing tunes with bands. That was huge for me.
Lawrence: Another thing that comes up a lot when I speak with artists who were classically trained is how the classical students were not encouraged to improvise.
Andrew: Absolutely. When you hear about somebody who can improvise in the classical world, they're like an anomaly. They're a unicorn almost. Whereas in creative music, people are improvising all the time. That's how people write. It's weird if you don't.
Lawrence: I wanted to ask you about this terrific Alex Ross quote. He described your music as "alternately beautiful and terrifying." I wonder what you imagine he's responding to there?
Andrew: I think that whenever you get a good review, you attribute it to everything that you think is good about your music, and you just accept it. Anytime you get a bad review, you’re just going to cut it off and throw it out. So I'm not sure I have a reasonable answer for you there, but I remember that gig in New York that he reviewed. I think he's a great critic and writer, and he really pulled something out that was pretty profound and honest about how my music is impacting people.
Lawrence: Are there applications for JADE beyond musical composition? Have you looked at therapy or therapeutic applications?
Andrew: There are some exciting opportunities for JADE in the adaptive use musical instrument space, and I'm really happy to have this album, The Laws of Nature, because it is a real artistic output on almost ten years of technical development.
The next steps with JADE are to explore some of these adaptive use avenues, and the opportunities are many. There are opportunities to work with musicians who can't play anymore, who maybe once did, who don't have dexterity or ability due to brain injury, or simply just illness. Neurodegenerative illness or even physical impairment. There are opportunities to use it for physical therapy. There's an opportunity to use it with neurodivergent creative artists. These are all things we're looking into now.
Lawrence: I have a son who has a pretty significant brain injury, and he's nonverbal. This seems like an interesting path towards unlocking expression for people like him. There's a metaphysical element here—you're making audible something that's fundamentally invisible.
Andrew: How old is your son?
Lawrence: He's about to turn eighteen.
Andrew: And he loves music?
Lawrence: He loves music. He loves sensory input. He always has.
Andrew: That's amazing. If we do a good job of shepherding the technology, then all of a sudden it becomes useful for a whole bunch of things we never imagined in the first place. That's really interesting to me.
Lawrence: Are there aspects of either human physiology or other environmental data that you haven't explored yet with JADE?
Andrew: There's a lot, and I think it comes back to our early conversation about nuance. The brainwaves go up and they go down, and I'm sampling two or three or four of the five I can get. But people ask this after I do the demonstration with the instrument all the time and say, "Can I tell when you're happy? Can I tell when you're anxious? Can I tell when you've had a great thought?" It's funny when you ask neural scientists who study this stuff, they just outright laugh and say, "It's not like that. It doesn't do that." But that's a question. Is there some nuance? Are your brainwaves going to give noticeably different output than my brainwaves?
So I think exploring the nuances—the joy of digital instruments—because violin and cello have been roughly the same for three hundred years, and we're still writing different music for them. The digital instrument world has not had that kind of nuance or exploration. It's like a one-and-done, "Check it out and move on." There's a lot of opportunity to explore all the stuff that's been made.
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