Don't you wonder some time ...about sound AND vision?

I have a bit of a soft spot for The Brunswick. My daughter and her then band The Willow Trio, had their first ever gig at the brilliantly-run (and ever-friendly) Brighton and Hove venue, and I’ve had many happy returns over the years. 

But last Sunday’s single launch party for Chloe Leigh's What Makes The World Go Round (SEE SONG OF THE WEEK) brought a new dimension to the grass roots gig experience with Arty Mikey sketching the performers on one side and Chris Riddell OBE illustrating the songs live on a screen above the stage.

Of course, we’re all familiar with the giant video screens relaying the mega-star action to the faithful-but-far-distant fans at large arena tours, but this wasn’t about that. 

At The Brunswick we were following every flowing line, curve and flourish of Chris’s scalpel-honed graphite (I’ll never use a pencil sharpener again!) as the illustrations sprang to life before us on the screen in accompaniment to the live music.

Sheer magic! 

The multi-award winning illustrator and former UK Children’s Laureate, was, I felt, just as much telling a story as the music and lyrics of the performers, only with real arcs rather than dramatic arcs and arpeggios. And the point (pun intended) was the same: to bring to life and crystallise an emotion, idea or event with just a few deft, recognisable, and highly relatable, lines. 

But there was something else going on here. 

While we, the audience, appear to be fairly inert and inactive during the performance, there is actually a huge amount of activity involved in the second-by-second appreciation of the piece being performed; or rather, our anticipation of how it will come together:

A particularly important feature of music is that its structure often involves patterns that allow listeners to form expectations, based on statistical learning, which may subsequently be fulfilled or betrayed. The experience of music is therefore intimately linked to brain-bound predictive models; e.g., tonality (the experience of a hierarchy of relations pointing towards a tonal centre in melody and harmony), and meter, the experience of regularly recurring rhythmic patterns and accents that underwrites the way we move regularly to sometimes highly irregular musical rhythms. In this review, we describe the process of listening to music, where we continuously construct predictions of what happens next in a musical piece, and how this process gives rise to perception, action, emotion, and -over time – learning as formulated in the predictive coding of music (PCM) model. In brief, the PCM model states that when we listen to music with melody, harmony and rhythm, the brain deploys a predictive model -based on prior experience – which guides our perception.*

However, when these audio-based predictions run concurrently with a second guessing game, i.e. what will Chris’s pencil bring forth next, the cumulative effect becomes truly marvellous, in the original sense of the word, ‘to cause wonder.’ 

…while we're simultaneously wondering just what impression our partners, companions and fellow audience members are also forming of the experience?

And it’s not just great fun.

Congruent audio-visual stimuli have been shown to trigger reward-related brain regions more than either modality working in isolation, but there may also be therapeutic applications, as one recent paper*** points out:

‘Audio Visual Entrainment (AVE) is a non-pharmacological, rhythmic, stimulus-driven intervention that aligns the brains electrical frequencies with externally presented audio and visual cues. This synchronisation is thought to influence various cognitive and emotional processes…’

Adding:

‘…compelling evidence suggests that ancient civilisations recognized the profound impact of visual and auditory stimuli on human consciousness. From the effects of gazing into a fire to the rhythmic drumming in shamanic rituals, these sensory experiences have shaped human interaction with the world.’

All that for £10 a ticket one very special Sunday by the sea. (£8 OTD)

DT

29 January 2026

*Music in the Brain Peter Vuust, Ole A. Heggli, Karl J. Friston & Morten Kringlebach National Review of Neuroscience, May 2022

**Audio-Visual Entrainment Neuromodulation: A Revie of Technical and Functional Aspects

Masoud Rahmnani, Leonor Josefina Romero Lauro and Alberto Pisoni, Brain Sciences 30 September 2025

Chris Riddell (@chris_riddell)