N.Y. `BRAIN OPERA' IS FINE AS TECHNOLOGY BUT TEDIOUS AS MUSIC.

Byline: Alex Ross The New York Times

Large tracts of the Juilliard School are being overrun by Tod Machover's ``Brain Opera,'' an electronic, computerized and Internet-connected work presented under the auspices of the Lincoln Center Festival '96.

As technology, it is striking. The audience contributes by playing with electronic gizmos in the lobby before each performance - seven a day, all free.

As music, it is tiresome and unpleasant.

The audience enters through an area called the Mind Forest, which, according to a program note, is designed to ``create the impression of walking, figuratively, into a giant musical brain.''

Juilliard's downstairs lobby has been dotted with glowing organic forms, among which are speaking and singing trees; enclosed, shell-shaped stations with video screens and microphones; a rhythm tree with nodules that emit percussive sounds when tapped; a screen called the melody easel that sings when rubbed; a musical video game called Harmonic Driving and a wall with sensors that connect music samples to hand motions.

In the speaking tree, Marvin Minsky, the co-founder of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, asks questions via videotape. For example: ``What is your favorite piece of music?'' and ``Have you listened to it more than once?''

At the wall, a hand waver may hear explosions of random Bachian figuration through the speakers. The correlation between gesture and sound is imprecise.

The signal to move to Morse Hall for the main performance comes as a relief, since the lobby area sounds like an exceptionally noisy video arcade.

For the 45-minute ``Brain Opera'' proper, Machover sits on a wooden throne, making conductorial motions in front of sensors.

Teresa Marrin and Maribeth Back manipulate other high-tech items. The singing voices of Anne Azema and Lorraine Hunt are among those heard on tape. Brief pronouncements by Minsky on the nature of the mind suffice as a libretto.

Fairly little of the audience's labors in the Mind Forest come through in the final mix.

The texture overflows with quasi-Bachian counterpoint, outright quotations from the ``Musical Offering,'' blowsy washes of synthesized instrumental sound, even some mysterious and disjointed music extracted from participants on the World Wide Web.

Machover's own compositional voice dominates: nervous, harmonically fast-shifting, sophisticated but shallow.

As a whole, ``Brain Opera'' is an early lapse of taste in the enlightened Lincoln Center Festival programming.

It brings to mind some overblown mind-control sequence in a '70s conspiracy movie, with Machover in the mad-scientist role and Minsky as a gently insinuating Big Brother.

The music substitutes activity for invention. The technological apparatus permits less genuine creative input from the audience than advertised.

The underlying philosophy of music, generated by collective insectlike gestures, is not uplifting.

`Brain Opera'' will run through Aug. 3.