Saxophonist and flautist Finn Peters is to launch and tour a new album titled Music Of The Mind in the autumn. The album explores some of the territory scientists interested in music and the brain have made advances on in recent years. Books such as Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia and Daniel Levitin’s This Is Your Brain On Music have mapped out new developments in the understanding of neuroscience, yet MOTM takes the new ideas in science a step further in terms of live performance.

Inspired by Dr Mick Grierson at Goldsmiths, University of London, who specialises in real-time interactive audiovisual research with a focus on cognition and perception, the Music Of The Mind project uses Brain Computer Interface technology and new software which claims to allow musicians to “think music into being.”

Peters and his musicians will dress in lab coats and will control instruments utilising the technology to perform new compositions which have titles such as ‘Agitation’, 'Brain Solo’, ‘Meditation’ and 'Oxygen’. The track ‘Sleep Music’ from the album, for instance, has a washy, slow feel, building gently to a drum part with a strong emphasis on the fourth beat opening up for the horns to inhabit closely arranged harmonic territory before transforming, and almost disappearing, into the smoke of the sound.

2010 has already been a year marked with some ambitious new jazz and technology projects including the groundbreaking Orchestrion robot orchestra concept developed by Pat Metheny.

Finn Peters recently has been touring with the Jerry Dammers Spatial AKA Orchestra, the exuberant Sun Ra and Alice Coltrane-inspired spiritual band led by the ex-Specials main man. Alice Coltrane’s influence is also among the range of styles and dynamic writing on Music Of The Mind, which will be available from Mantella records on 25 October. Peters' last album was Butterflies from two years ago, but it was his Eastern-flavoured album Su-Ling that caused a stir and went on to be voted number six in the list of Jazzwise albums of the year for 2006 while his Finntet won best band at the 2007 BBC Jazz Awards.

The MOTM band features alongside Peters, Tom Skinner of Zed-U, recently in action with Ethiojazz legend Mulatu Astatke, on drums and electronics; Dave Price, percussion; Oren Marshall tuba; and Matthew Yee King, electronics, using the Neurosky BCI headset and custom-built software. Peters and King will give a talk on Neuromusic at the Science Museum in London on 17 September. The tour dates are: South Hill Park, Bracknell (16 October); Phoenix Arts Centre, Exeter (20 October) and Cafe Oto, London (29 October); continuing the following month at Turner Sims, Southampton (25 November) and Band on the Wall, Manchester (26 November).

– Stephen Graham