Artist Profile: Max B. Allison ’25 Explores The Intersection of Art and Technology

Whether playing a dark villain or a comic school principal in campus musicals, writing programs to control music with his brain waves or performing in the band Boom Boom Sauce, Max B. Allison ’25 has dabbled in a wide range of artistic fields at Harvard. A Computer Science concentrator, he is passionate about “marry[ing]” arts and technology in particular.

Musically inclined since his childhood and an actor in his high school’s theater program, Allison expanded the scope of his art to consider where technology could fit in among Harvard’s art scene.

“I did some theater stuff in high school, and then continue to do that here,” he said in an interview with The Crimson. “But also, I’ve combined them to make what I think are cool interdisciplinary art.”

Max served as technical director for Conflux, a student organization at Harvard that supports experimental art projects created with technology.

For Conflux, Max developed code to allow a user’s brain waves to control a synthesizer. He showcased the project, which he dubbed “Psychosymphonies,” this May in Paine Hall, performing a 10-minute piece that he composed based on the auralization of his brain waves.

Allison initially thought the idea was too ludicrous to actually work.

“This is just an idea that I had as a joke walking with a friend being like, ‘What if you could use your brain waves’ — I don’t know anything about neuroscience or anything like that — ‘to control a piece of music live?’ It was just a funny idea that we laughed off,” he said.

However, after securing a grant from the engineering department for an electroencephalograph, a machine that measures electrical activity in the brain, Max spent an “absurd amount of time” researching machine learning algorithms to identify brain waves and to control an interface. He wrote code to allow a user to put on an electroencephalograph that steered the output of a synthesizer.

According to Allison, the music produced by the machine matched the frequency of the user’s brain waves rather than any directive from the mind.

“[You] really interactively hear what’s going on in your brain, not in the traditional sense, like ‘I’m thinking about a classical song and now classical music is playing,’ but really being like ‘My brain waves are heightened right now because I'm nervous and I’m thinking about this.’ And you can hear some of the synths are being mapped to higher frequencies,” he said.

For Conflux, Allison also built a natural language processing model for “Notes on Love,” a project that sought to answer the question: How do Harvard and MIT students view love?

At an event organized by Allison, attendees viewed the visualization of Max’s program which categorized roughly 100 love notes based on their positivity and originality.

“You see a beautiful relationship,” Allison said. “Some love letters to people are incredibly positive, and it’s like, ‘I love you and I want to spend the rest of my life with you.’ And some are love letters to people that really hurt other people. And so it’s really interesting.”

In addition to his technological experiences with art, Allison has also performed as an actor, taking on roles as different as the violent villain JD in “Heathers” and the comic principal Doug Panch in “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.” He approaches his roles by trying to find their connection to himself.

“I access the parts of myself that I feel like are really genuine to me. Whenever I’m assigned a character it’s like, ‘What of this character really resonates with me and, how do I put that out onto the stage?’” Allison said.

Allison also performs with the student band Boom Boom Sauce, which opened for Tinashe at Crimson Jam this year, and the a capella group the Harvard Callbacks. For Boom Boom sauce, an R&B pop band, Allison enjoys bucking convention in song mashups.

“We spend a lot of our time just thinking of weird ideas and mashing stuff up for a specific gig,” he said.

For Allison, what unites all of the varied art forms that he has tried his hand at is their objective: Telling stories.

“If you get up on stage or get up on whatever your artistic pedestal is and tell a good story I think that you’ll just have a blast,” he said. “And then the people watching you will see you having a blast and be like, ‘This is really good, and this is really genuine, and this feels like good art.’”