brain music

Dan Lloyd, Brownell Professor of Philosophy at Trinity College, is using fMRI data from scans of the brain to synthesize “music”, and has found that different brains make very different melodies.

Lloyd created software which translates data from a brain scan to Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) data. This lets him use the information to control a synthesizer, resulting in brain-driven synthesis. According to Lloyd, this technology that may give new insights into the differences and similarities between normal and dysfunctional brains.

“The sounds work in unison and create melodies,” he said. “Different parts harmonize with each other to make not just sounds, but music.”

Lloyd used this technology to compare brain scans from people with dementia and schizophrenia to healthy subjects and found a noticeable difference in the music they created.

For more videos on Lloyd’s research, check his YouTube channel.

Do you think this qualifies as music, or is it just translating information from one timeline based form to another? Leave a comment with your thoughts!

via the BBC: The Multimodal Brain Orchestra performed its world premiere on Thursday.

Led by an “emotional conductor” and a traditional one, music and video change in time with the performers’ brain waves and heart rate. According to the work’s producer, the orchestra aims to “see what the brain can do without the body”.

The orchestra’s premiere performance closed the Science Beyond Fiction conference in Prague.

“Only recently we have come to appreciate more the tight coupling between mind, brain and body,” Paul Verschure, head of the project, told the audience. “But we can wonder what the mind and brain would be capable of if it would be directly interfaced to the world, bypassing the body.”

What do you think of the Multimodal Brain Orchestra’s brain music? Is it time to junk the old gear?

More on the Multimodal Brain Orchestra below.
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In this video, Okudaira-san from MI7 Japan, is using a brainwave analyzer from IBVA to get signals from his brain into the computer, which control the red, green and blue color channels of a Percussa AudioCube.

Percussa’s Bert Schiettecatte is looking for cool AudioCubes demos, so if you’re using them in a unique way, let him know at cubes (at) percussa (dot) com.

Let me know in the comments, too!

We’ve talked about brain music before – everything from brain music therapy to binaural brain beat synthesizers to hardcore brain-controlled synth action to bogus stories about dudes controlling synths with mind bullets.

It’s hard to believe, but it looks like there may be a commercial future for brain music medicine.

According to a Fox News report, Dr. Galina Mindlin, a psychiatrist at Columbia University in New York City has been using brain music therapy for three years to treat a variety of ills, including insomnia, anxiety, attention deficit disorder, depression, substance abuse and stress.

A complete treatment, which includes a brief medical evaluation, a recording of the brain waves and a personalized music file, costs $550.

According to Mindlin, the therapy has an 80-85 percent success rate. That’s where my BS detector goes off.

Drug treatment programs have abysmally low completion rates – one study reports that about 3.5% of those that start a drug treatment program complete it.

Call me skeptical on brain music therapy, even if there’s a market for it.

Let me know what you think!

Got a brain? Then you can make music!

At the UK Aldeburgh Festival, set for June 13-29, Norwegian composer Rolf Wallin is going to be demonstrating the latest brain music action.

This isn’t like controlling modular synthesizers with mind bullets, though.

According to the Telegraph, you simply “let a skilled assistant fasten electrodes to your head, relax and enjoy a short film specially designed to stimulate your brain activity. A computer converts your brainwaves into your own very own music […] The music is performed real-time on a self-playing piano, and you can purchase a CD of your work to take away.”

Fragmented Orchestra

If that’s not enough brain music for you, the winning entry for the recent PRS New Music Award may interest you.

The Fragmented Orchestra is a music installation that aims to let us hear the human brain at work.

Digital “neuron units” will gather and process the sounds of 24 locations round the UK, ranging from a cathedral to a school playground to a dairy farm. These units will link together into a kind of virtual brain, processing the sounds and feeding the results out at the locations themselves and at FACT, Liverpool.