Nik Sawe

Nik Sawe is a lecturer in Stanford's Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources (E-IPER), using neuroimaging via fMRI to study human decision-making on environmental issues. This work brings together research techniques from behavioral economics, neuroeconomics, decision science, and energy/environmental policy. At CCRMA, Nik combines his love of composition with his research, turning fMRI brain signals and environmental data into music. You can hear his method rendering someone's visual cortex activity playing a string quartet here: stanford.edu/~sawe/fmriorchestra/Visual Quartet Final Render.mp3. He also used it on ecological data to show the effect of climate change on Alaskan forests: www.scientificamerican.com/article/tree-loss-is-put-to-music-audio/. You can learn more about the process through Outdoor Online's podcast:

 www.outsideonline.com/2116591/dispatches-ep-01-sound-science