P 600 at cuiet cue #114

William ‘Bilwa’ Costa – laptop, electronics, raw materials
Klaus Janek – double bass, laptop, electronics
Luca Marini – percussion, electronics
Nicolas Wiese – live sound manipulation, non-laptop-electronics

P600 is an electro-acoustic quartet who will make its debut on this evening, after a 3-day rehearsal period at Quiet Cue, Berlin.

P600 experiments with a range of acoustic, electro-acoustic and acousmatic sound. In addition to the large soundsystem, controlled by Nicolas, each musician has a personal sound system. This allows for a micro-to-macro and audible-to-inaudible sound dynamic.

The P600 is an event-related potential (ERP), or peak in electrical brain activity measured by electroencephalography (EEG). It is a language-relevant ERP and is thought to be elicited by hearing or reading grammatical errors and other syntactic anomalies. Therefore, it is a common topic of study in neurolinguistic experiments investigating sentence processing in the human brain.

The P600 can be elicited in both visual (reading) and auditory (listening) experiments, and is characterized as a positive-going deflection with an onset around 500 milliseconds after the stimulus that elicits it; it often reaches its peak around 600 milliseconds after presentation of the stimulus (hence its name), and lasts several hundred milliseconds. In other words, in the EEG waveform it is a large peak in the positive direction, which starts around 500 milliseconds after the subject sees or hears a stimulus. The P600 was first reported by Lee Osterhout and Phillip Holcomb in 1992. It is also sometimes called the Syntactic Positive Shift (SPS), since it has a positive polarity and is usually elicited by syntactic phenomena.

perpetualmvmtsnd.org/bilwa
klaus-janek.de
myspace.com/lucamarini
nicolaswiese.com