The endlessly engaging Richard Reed Parry has had a hand in some of the most successful indie rock music to ever come out of Canada. You’ve seen him wearing a helmet and hollering at the top of his lungs as he busts out bass riffs with the Arcade Fire (he’s currently recording string parts for their next album in New York City), and he’s also the driving force behind the gorgeous post-rock ensemble Bell Orchestre (who release a new EP next week).

Though Parry insists he’s a self-taught bassist, he does boast a degree in electro-acoustic sound studies from Concordia University, and he’s putting that background to good use with this latest project, “For Heart and Breath and Orchestra.” It’s the third in a collection of compositions that incorporate the involuntary physiological responses of orchestral players (in this case, heartbeats and breathing patterns) into the fabric of the music they’re performing.

How did you come up with the idea of using body responses as compositional elements?
It was an idea I’ve been sitting on for a long time, writing music where the involuntary parts of the human body are directly linked into music – the three easiest examples of these functions being heartbeat and lungs and blinking, though I haven’t done anything with blinking yet. A couple years ago, I wrote something called ‘Duet for Heart and Breath,’ which was a piano and viola piece in which the pianist wears a stethoscope and plays to his heart, and the violist plays to her breathing. All the music was written, but the players had to listen to each other for cues to move forward. It had a beautiful fragile quality. I feel like it takes a little bit of the John Cage experience of letting things happen as they will, but I also wanted to make an engaging piece of music. … It seems like a whole format of music that hasn’t really been done before – I want to put together a cycle of compositions or a whole album’s worth of compositions.

What was the biggest challenge about using elements that you as a composer can’t control?
I wrote what I vaguely wanted it to sound like, harmonically or whatever, with the knowledge that it wasn’t going to be super rhythmically precise. I had a vision of it being a pointillistic, slow-moving stop-and-start piece. Most of the mental work came from figuring out how to organize it through time, so you’re not creating this thing that’s chaotic and rolls all over the place. You could do that, and it would be more John Cage-ian – leaving everything to chance – but right now, I want to write music that works and has some aleatoric organizational principles. This piece uses the conductor’s breathing as a rhythmic regulator. It’s written in bars like a normal score, but there’s no tempo. Every bar relies on one of the performers’ internal rhythms to move forward. I wanted the internal structure to be audible all the time – I didn’t want to keep the concept and mask the process.

Why you think we’ve seen so many crossovers between between the indie rock and classical/new music worlds?
Symphony music is composed differently and people listen to it differently. It’s gentler and not necessarily based so much on performance and popularity. The spectrum of possibilities gets so much bigger if you take that side into account. In New York, the kids playing on [the new Arcade Fire record] are Julliard-trained string players, and they all have their own contemporary music ensembles. They’re so excited about new compositions! I think the way forward is always to encourage new hybrids. One of the guys from Battles just made an album that’s an orchestra of crazy loops with him singing over top. It’s insane Disney music, and it’s coming out on Warp — people who buy Warp albums might end up picking it up and discovering these wild new sounds, which I think is the best possible thing. [Laughs.] Really, it’s just that everyone agrees now that Radiohead is good. Classical people love them, rock people love them, jocks love them… Radiohead is the answer.