Prof. Milton Mermikides: Phantom melodies and Tangerine Trees

Milton Mermikides, 37th Gresham Professor of Music at Surrey University, will take us on voyage through the psychedelic musical experience. Professor Milton Mermikides: Phantom melodies and Tangerine Trees: A voyage through the psychedelic musical experience This talk explores the intersection of musical and psychedelic experiences. Themes of the ‘magical mundane’, the blending of senses, hallucination, altered perceptions of time and self, and moments of transcendence are common to both domains. Through musical illusions, perceptual experiments and examples from The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Tchaikovsky, Steve Reich and beyond, this illustrated and interactive lecture explores how music can evoke, amplify and illuminate these extraordinary states of consciousness. Such an exploration suggests that music not only creates these seemingly psychedelic experiences, but relies upon the very same perceptual mechanisms for its extraordinary power. Milton Mermikides is a composer, guitarist, academic, technologist and educator obsessed with how music works (the nature of music) and how music can help understand and engage with the wider world (the music of nature). He is Professor of Music at the University of Surrey, Professor of Jazz Guitar at the Royal College of Music, Senior Research Fellow and Composer-In-Residence of the Centre of Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing (University of Oxford), and the 37th Gresham Professor of Music – a historic post founded in 1597 whose previous incumbents include John Bull, Iannis Xenakis and Joanna MacGregor. Milton has collaborated with John Williams, Brian Eno, Tim Minchin, Evelyn Glennie and Peter Zinovieff and has given keynote lectures and public events at the Royal Musical Association, the Science Museum, the Smithsonian Institute, The Design Museum, The British Sleep Society, the Royal Society of Medicine, British Computer Society, and the Royal Physiological Society.