Credit: Olivia Moon
When Harvard Music Graduate Student Micah Huang moved to the East Coast to pursue a Master’s Degree at Tufts University, they were ready for a change. After growing up in Los Angeles, Huang spent their post-undergrad years touring the West Coast, but they wanted more. “As time went along, I found myself wanting and attempting to do things creatively that didn’t fit into a bar band.” Huang explains, “I was getting fatigued by the lifestyle and I was ready to branch out.” After graduating from Tufts in 2019, Huang taught music classes that went virtual during the COVID-19 pandemic. “I used to be super anti-technology,” they admit, “I didn’t have a smartphone until 2016, I wasn’t even on the internet until around 2006.” The pandemic forced Huang to embrace technology, and allowed them to view it through a new lens. “I had started to get involved in the activist art world and other waves of techno activism. I realized [technology] was a tool that could be used to build community and mutual understanding across difference.”
“I was working with my family and advocating for understanding; that’s part of what set me on the path to opening up my horizons in terms of working with and connecting to people. It didn’t feel easy to get across what I was trying to get across to people who didn’t have the lived experiences. This led me to focus more on family, culture, and community and I reconnected with some things buried deep in my past that have a very culturally East Asian influence.” Huang became especially interested in the concept of life energy, or chi, which continues to inform their work. “I went down a rabbit hole looking into life energy and technology and how the two interface. I started to become interested in neuroscience and I knew that I wanted to engage with people who are working with energy, health, and community in these new and fascinating ways. I wanted to be part of that conversation.” Ultimately, Huang knew they wanted to re-enter the world of Academia, joining the Creative Practice and Critical Inquiry program in 2023.
Credit: Emma Gies
Now halfway through their second year, Huang is ready to make their voice heard. “I feel like I can finally articulate what my research is focused on.” They say, “I’m interested in the relationship between energy theories and practices that are grounded in the world of Traditional Chinese Medicine, and the more empiricist, reductionist approach taken by academia as a whole. There’s an idea that those two things are irreconcilable, and I disagree with that. I think it’s a question of finding the path that leads from one to the other, it’s a sort of translation.”
“We can use art and science collaborations as ways to explore the space between data points.”
In November 2024, Huang produced Sounding Psychedelia, their first major event at Harvard. The immersive concert experience was created in collaboration with Dr. Ying Wu and the UC San Diego Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience. “The show is tied to an investigation being undertaken by Dr. Wu and her lab about the potential of neuroscience-informed approaches to aesthetic interventions.” Using EEG Brainwave recordings from psychedelic therapy sessions, they mapped data to musical parameters, creating electronic music and accompanying visuals. “Think of data as the shadow of energy.” They explain, “Energy is a thing with many dimensions and when it’s recorded or transduced into data it’s reduced in dimensionality but you can still engage with what’s happening on the energy level through the biometric data. At its core that’s a lot of what neuroscience does; my work extends this process into the realm of art, exploring the relationship between sensory inputs and cognitive processes through an aesthetic lens.”
“I really want to connect with the wonderfully diverse range of people who are working with and touching the world of psychedelics research.”
Reflecting on Sounding Psychedelia, Huang is excited to let the process lead them. “I think that doing it under the umbrella of arts makes it so that the focus isn’t so much on results as it is on sparking conversations and making connections.” After Sounding Psychedelia, Huang says they received some unexpected responses. “Someone who works in psychedelics research was saying that there’s a struggle for informed consent in [psychedelic] trials, especially if people haven’t taken them before. If we could show a similar effect to people experiencing something like this versus a low dose of psychedelics, it could be used as a way to give people some idea of what to expect, which would make informed consent easier to achieve.”
This feature was originally published in the Winter 2024 Newsletter. Click here to read the full newsletter.