Jake Mandell: Electronic Music & Medical Education

WINTER 2009/2010 NEWS: Scales of Magnification, my fourth album and first major work since 2002, is now available for purchase (with free preview) at the iTunes Music Store. Seven years in the making, Scales of Magnifications features arrays of biological melodies that collide with alien rhythms, and microedits dancing elegantly with the macro-scale.

Academic/Research: I am currently a resident in Radiology at Brigham and Women's Hospital affiliated with Harvard Medical School. I graduated from the University of Massachusetts Medical School in 2008, and completed an internship in Internal Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. My research interests include the neuroimaging of music and neuroradiology.

Medical Education: I've co-created a series of Flash-based modules focusing on neuroanatomy, one of which has been integrated into the Harvard Medical School curriculum. In addition, I have created several hundred pages of board-review style medical school notes, which have been downloaded thousands of times.

Electronic Music: I have also been producing computer music for the past fifteen years, and was one of the first electronic musicians to explore the laptop for music production and live performance in the late 90's and early 2000's. I released three albums and numerous EPs, and have had the opportunity to play solo shows at famous venues through North America, Europe, and Japan, including the Knitting Factory, Mutek, Sonar, and the Walker Art Museum.

Music Tests: Over one million subjects have taken the free Tonedeaf Test. Since then, I have created a total of four tests that quantify musical performance in the rhythm, frequency, and visual domains.

Lesion Localizer

Lesion Localizer is a flash-based interactive environment to integrate MRI anatomy with the clinical presentation of classic neurological syndromes. At the heart of the project is an MRI atlas in which structures are highlighted and labeled as the mouse moves over the image. This tool allows one to become familiar with neuroanatomy on MRI, and realize the importance of anatomical localization in clinical thinking. Lesion localizer was created with Amar Dhand, MD and Gillian Lieberman, MD and has been integrated into the Harvard Medical School Neurology clerkship curriculum.

Idiopathic Interstitial Pneumonia Explorer

The seven classic idiopathic interstitial pneumonias are a fascinating and frustrating subset of diffuse lung disease characterized by typical pathological and CT findings. This brief tutorial integrates the radiology and patholophysiology with simple illustrations. It was created with Seth Kligerman, MD, a thoracic radiology fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital, and is part of the supplementary online curriculum for MGH internal medicine residents.

Interactive Head CT Atlas

The head CT is one of the most common radiological exams performed today. Even though MRI is much better at visualizing brain and soft tissues, the head CT is cheaper, faster, and is the first exam ordered in head trauma, stroke, or other suspected neurological diseases. In this atlas, labelled structures are directly highlighted when they are moused over - this techniques circumvents the frustrating "follow the line" that is necessary with traditional atlasas.

This atlas was created with the help of Deepak Takhtani, MD, Director of Neuroradiology at UMASS memorial medical center.

Medical School Notes

An astonishing amount of information is presented to students during the second year of medical school. After "warming up" with traditional first-year courses such as Anatomy, Biochemistry, and Physiology, the bulk of medical fundamentals are poured into dense daily lectures in the second year.

I attempted to bring a little bit of order to this deluge of information by creating a series of comprehensive notes (>200 pages worth) with integrated self-assesing multiple choice questions similar to the USMLE board exams.

These notes are free to download and have become an unofficial part of the second-year curriculum at UMass medical school. Topics covered including Pathology (nine blocks), Microbiology, Pharmacology, and Neurology.

Tonedeaf Test

The original tonedeaf test, taken by over one million people. I created this test while working at the music and neuroimaging lab at Beth Israel/Harvard Medical School during medical school. In our research, we were looking for neuro-anatomical correlates of tonedeafness and we used this test as a quick screening test to see if subjects might be suitable for our study. After you take this test you can compare your results to tens of thousands of other subjects to see how "tonedeaf" (or "musical") you really are.

Adaptive Pitch

This test measures your pitch perception abilities by adapting to your responses: The better you are, the closer and closer the stimuli will become. Like the tonedeaf test above, this test was developed while working as a researcher at the Music and Neuroimaging laboratory at Beth Israel/Harvard Medical School. At the end of the test, you will be presented with population statistics on over 11,000 subjects who have anonymously submitted their scores.

AMVI

What is AMVI? Associative Musical Visual Intelligence (or "amvi" for short) is a type of intelligence that's difficult enough to define, let alone test. Many creative people can associate across sensory domains: they "hear" hints of shapes and can "taste" the essense of colors. At its most extreme this phenomenon is called synesthesia. However, I believe that creative people subconsciously employ elements of synesthesia every day when attempting to think of things in new ways. This is a logic test that attempts to measure one's ability to correlate musical phrases with abstract shapes and symbols.

Rhythm Test

This test is very similar to the tonedeaf test above: You will hear a series of two rhythmical phrases and be asked to decide if they are the same or different. Unlike the tonedeaf test, however, the differences between the two phrases are only rhythmical. At the end of the test, you can compare your performance to that of over 7,000 subjects who had previously submitted their scores. Of all of the musical tests, this one is one of the more difficult ones as it's much harder for an untrained individual to remember complex rhythmical phrases.

Live Performances

In addition to the famous venues highlighted to the left, I have played dozens of live shows at clubs, museums, and art festivals in most of Europe including France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Slovakia as well as Japan and major cities in the US. My live laptop-based show consists of a custom Reaktor instrument and is truly live. I am not currently playing shows due to my medical responsibilities.

Software Development/Product Managment

Native Instruments is one of the leading developers of software instruments that are used in many film soundtracks and popular music productions. Reaktor is a modular production environment where it's possible to realize virtually any instrument design. Absynth is a cutting-edge software synthesizer. I was product manager of Reaktor and Absynth at Native Instruments' Berlin headquarters from 2000 to 2003.

Slither (DVD, 2002, 5.1 surround sound)

Slither is the first surround-sound production to be produced entirely on a laptop. It is a 41 minute abstract collaboration with the visual artist and animator Jeffers Egan, who has exhibited at several modern art collections in the US and Europe. Slither was nominated for POPKOMM's (Germany) "Best Surround Production" and was named Musikwoche's (Germany) DVD of the Week.

Slither was showcased at several media festivals including the Visual Music Marathon in Boston; ResFest in Turin, Italy; International Short Film Festival in Leuven, Belgium; GenArts Salon in NYC; Interferenze NEw Arts Festival in San Martino, Italy; Rencontres Audiovisuelles; Lille, France; Cimatics Festival, Belgium; Nice Film Fest, France; Transmediale, Berliin, and several more.

In addition to creating Slither together, Jeffers and I have performed live at the Netmage World VJ Championships in 2002 and 2003 in Bologna Italy as well as at WMF/Berlin and the Bunker/NYC.

Love Songs for Machines (Carpark NYC, 2001)

My third album. From igloo: "Love Songs For Machines leaves no computer music movement untouched. From the poppy new waveness of new order and early human league, to the unique timbres and rhythms that can only be achieved with late 20th century computer software, love songs for machines brings the last 50 years of computer music history together into one very bold emotional statement." Spin review: "LOVE SONGS opts for shiatsu seduction, carefully targeting different electrogenous zones with synth beats that recall New Order and Depeche Mode... Jake has found the soul in his machine, and even a little groove." Alternative press: "Just plain gorgeous...an arresting work of experimental pop music." Click on the link above to purchase the album from amazon.com (also available on itunes and most online retailers).

Quondam Current (Force-Inc Germany, 2000)

My second album. From the pitchforkmedia review: "Quondam Current is a stalwart example of a musician fully coming to grips with his artistic vision and the technology needed to realize it... This album is out to prove that he's at least Richard D. James' peer, as well as give Autechre a long-overdue wake-up call... Quondam Current is just too short. 55 minutes of texturized warped sonics is just too brief a time to relish such a talent."

Out of print: Click on the link above to download the entire album for free.

Parallel Processes (Worm-Interface UK, 1998)

My first album. Album of the Year (Minneapolis City Pages). Review: "like few Minneapolis musicians of the decade, Mandell has inspired not just a national, but an international buzz. In England, he's as big as, say, R.E.M. was in 1981, or the Jayhawks in 1989. There is an excited awareness that this 23-year-old devotee of Schoenberg, Mary Renault, and the Ken Steiglitz tech-manual A Digital Signal Processing Primer might attain something akin to hipster celebrity. Parallel Processes is probably the biggest thing the Upper Midwest electronic-music scene has produced since acid house stars Freddie Fresh and DJ ESP put the "Minneapolis sound" on the international dance map five years ago."

Out of print: Click on the link above to download the entire album for free.

More releases (selected EPs for download)

Click the link above to download complete versions of the Primedeep EP, the Midwest EP, and the Noche de Luna EP. These three early works are all out of print.

Site content © Jake Mandell, MD
Banner graphic by Julie Hom-Mandell and Jeffers Egan
I can be reached by email at: llednamekaj@gmail.com
Site updated 2009