Reach - Raise Awareness - Heal - Inspire
The Hippocampus Project is a musical creation aimed at raising awareness of the paths taken by survivors after rape by combining technological arts and popular song.
With the assistance of the co-founder of the NXI Gestatio, Nicolas Reeves, Marie Martine Bédard started her songwriting process wearing a biofeedback headset of 64 channels to capture her brain waves while she recalled the paths of her survivor's journey. The captured signals were then converted into sound waves and subsequently transformed into melodic and rhythmic embryos by Jean-François Lemieux, musician and coproducer of the Hippocampus album, and Marie Martine Bédard. These sound materials have thus served as a basic framework for the composition of the various pieces of the album and as melodic instruments in their own rights.
The title "The Hippocampus Project" refers to the hippocampus of the brain in which traumatic phenomena are recorded. This seahorse-like structure in the brain influences the way one responds to these dislocations of soul and body that are trauma.
Thus was born for Marie Martine Bédard the powerful and intimate symbolic association between memory and the sea, the imaginary place of all the subconscious and all the unconscious. Nestled in the hollow of a remote cerebral cavity, the hippocampus travels, during healing processes, a motionless journey whose stages lead the person from the darkness of pain and the fear of death to the light of rebirth and life.
