Vibrations and how they get to your ears.
Noise for airports is a blog about culture, sound, music, and technology.
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Updated (sometimes) by Nick Seaver.
I just found a sort of wild paper (via Neurotopia) about an experiment to sonify (like, make into sound?) EEG data. Reading the paper (and totally not understanding the math parts), it seems that the trick here is to create mappings for various EEG parameters that convert them into musical parameters. (I’d post images/sounds in here, but Tumblr isn’t as great as it could be for multi-media integration, so the following posts will have some illustrations.)
Science part 1: convert brain waves to some sort of MIDI file
But they didn’t stop there! After creating the music of REM sleep and SWS (SWS being the sleepier kind of sleep, I guess: “slow wave sleep”), the researchers had subjects listen to two REM/SWM samples to learn what they sound like. Then, these freshly-trained brain listeners were played a bunch of REM/SWM music, mixed in with some white noise samples and other assorted brain music. The result? Listeners could often distinguish the two different kinds of sleep from crazy music alone!
Science part 2: train brain whisperers in the new art of brain whispering
I’ve promised some theorizing, so here goes:
This kind of brain-controlled music-making is not new; as they reference in the paper, there is some significant prior art in Alvin Lucier’s “Music for Solo Performer,” In which Lucier straps electrodes to his head to sense alpha waves (which apparently are produced when the brain is resting). The alpha waves trigger various mallets to hit various percussion instruments, the effect being a meditative performer causing percussive cacophony. Here is a video of one performance:
“Music for Solo Performer” is most interesting not for the fact that it uses the brain (most music requires you to use your brain in some capacity, right?), but for the way it reconceives the relationship between performer, instrument, and sound.
Lucier plays conventional instruments in an unconventional way, cutting out music reading from the equation, and replacing it with an uncontrolled, “natural” sound source. The act of sonification, in both Lucier’s piece and the science paper, is fundamentally a remediation. There is no “proper” way to change the intensity of brain waves into music; certain technological, social, and cultural decisions have to be made, explicitly or implicitly.
Commenters on the Neurotopia post rightly question why the sonification is quantized into Western musical divisions like semitones. Why not use a continuous spectrum? What about incorporating noise elements? When starting with “natural” source material like brain waves, it is easy to forget the technosocial translations that happen to make brain waves into EEG numbers and EEG numbers into pitch, duration, and amplitude data.
I’ll post one of the audio samples and a diagram for you guys to check out, but it’s worth taking a look at the original paper.
p.s. This whole biofeedback thing reminds me of that game show that used to be on ABC, “The Chair.” Hosted by John McEnroe, the idea was that they put you in a chair over terrifying things and you had to answer trivia questions, but only if you could keep your heart rate down. TV game shows as experimental music?
