Erika June Christina Laing is a Pittsburgh-based musician, producer, writer, experimental artist, and cognitive neuroscientist whose work explores how people find meaning, in signals, sounds, stories, and one another.
Her projects move freely among science, music, performance, technology, narrative, and community. Sometimes that means studying how the brain represents language; sometimes it means transforming EEG into sound, attempting to coax speech from a musical saw, building a composition around the hidden pitches of slowed-down pigeon calls, interviewing musicians, writing interactive narratives, or bringing strangers together in a room to share songs and stories.
Professionally, Erika has spent more than twenty years in cognitive neuroscience, with particular expertise in human electrophysiology and magnetoencephalography (MEG). Her work has included cognitive neuroscience and language research as well as a decade developing and performing clinical brain-mapping techniques for patients undergoing treatment for tumors and epilepsy. More recently, she has worked in Carnegie Mellon University’s Machine Learning Department studying the neural representation of language.
Alongside that scientific career, Erika has developed an independent creative practice spanning music, writing, performance, audio, film, interactive media, and live events. Her recent experimental work increasingly brings those worlds together. Brain Dance, developed with support from Carnegie Mellon’s Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, transforms aspects of performers’ and audience members’ physiological signals into a live sonic environment. Her Sawlk Box Technique, developed through research for a proposed musical-saw opera, uses the human vocal tract to shape the sound of a musical saw into speech-like forms. Her original composition Amber Tides, created for Andrew Calvetti’s film Coyote Road, grew from experiments transforming animal vocalizations and other found sounds into musical material.
Her other projects include the Petticoat Rule podcast, the monthly PSST! (People’s Song SocieTea) salon, and musical projects including Working Breed and Erika June & The Tunes, as well as documentary collaborations, interactive narrative work, journalism, and community arts programming.
Across these seemingly different forms runs a recurring curiosity: What happens when we transform a signal, listen closely, and discover meaning where we did not expect to find it? Erika is particularly interested in the spaces where scientific inquiry and artistic experimentation meet, and in creating experiences that invite people to listen, notice, participate, and connect.