Brainwaves

Dear people of the tuning list.

Here is a recent E-Mail from a freind of mine, who is intending to be doing
some experimenting with
brainwaves and music.

I have misplaced the E-Mail of the gentleman who was interested in this form
of sonic alchemy, but I hope he can reply with ideas.

This is but one way of using the brainwaves, and, assumedly, one could use
voltage and current to control speaker position, or pitch of sound, volume
ect......

We can make sonograms, compression waveforms, effect samples, but don't let
me go on.......

Anyway, assumedly, there will be a matter of where in the brain the
voltage/current is measured, and also how states of awareness effect this.

I do know that people have controlled the movement of small toy cars by
brain waves, and this has interesting implications for teleportation and
communication-even non programming programmes.

Hi, Sarn - do you mean speech-activated commands for your computer?And if
so, where are you getting it from? I've been trying to get this for ages!!
My project involving brain-waves to music has never been put into practice,
it is theory only. But it has been done: I have a videoclip of Cathy Lee
Crosby being wired up to a machine that used her EEG output to trigger rows
of analogue synths. The result was not the sort of thing one easily
describes as music, unless you're into extreme avant-garde, but it was
delightfully unpedictable, and, as Cathy Lee pointed out afterwards, it was
all her own composition.
My idea was to take it the logical step further and hook the output of a
biofeedback machine, which detects waves emanating from the superficial
neocortex, through a bank of 16 CV-to-MIDI converters (one for each MIDI
channel), and plug 'em into multitimbral synths, samplers, whathaveyou. It
would be like using a guitar or drum controller to play a MIDI appliance,
except the controller would be one's own cerebral electrical potentials -
brain waves. Again, I do not think anything musically useful would result.
The neocortex puts out regular 2 - 5 Hz alpha waves as electricity sweeps
across it while in a relaxed but awake mode; faster 10 Hz waves in the
excited "beta" state. and slow, high-voltage waves in the "theta" stage of
sleep. Deeper in the brain, areas like the hippocampus, thalamic nuclei,
medulla, reticular formation, etc., have their own rhythms controlled by
clusters of cells arranged in ganglia. None of these rhythms conform in any
sense with the laws of music; it would be like tapping into the ignition
system of your car with a MIDI device. Also, there is no way - yet - of
tapping the "music in your head" phenomenon: that is a result of memory
engrams triggering parts of the auditory cortex, making it release sound
data into the conscious mind in a complex, and indeciphered, code. Rather
like a digital sampler encoding sound into a binary format. Only if
scientists could unlock the brain's incredibly complex codes could we plug
our minds into a loudspeaker and hear someone's mental music.
What on Earth is a "hyper-computer"? Please elucidate. Cheers, Keith.
>

Sarn Richard Ursell <thcdelta@pop.ihug.co.nz> wrote:

>... intending to be doing some experimenting with brainwaves and music.
>...

If the operation is not done in real time then I would simply record it
as a waveform and then speed it up by a factor of about 50 to 100 to
move the 0.5-40 Hz frequencies into the 25-2000 or 50-4000 Hz range that
humans can hear well. This would pretty interesting I think, and I
would love to receive any WAV files of brain recordings.

If it is to be done in real time then I would still try to go for a 50
to 100 speed up by simply moving all the frequencies up by that factor
but in this case the piece would last 50 to 100 times longer. There are
several ways to do this, but using FFT to make a spectrum and then
generating a waveform to play from the adjusted frequencies is the most
accurate.

I have been doing vipassana meditation for about a year and I think that
I could now have some measure of control over what frequencies I make
and maybe make single tones with a little bit of practice and would love
to get involved in such a project. I see that you are in NZ the same as
me. Where is your friend? I am in Auckland, telephone (09) 419 0073.

Thinking of feedback, don't play the output too loud and too near the
person or you might generate a feedback loop and make an almighty squeel
in the person's brain :-)

-- Ray Tomes -- http://www.kcbbs.gen.nz/users/rtomes/rt-home.htm --
Cycles email list -- http://www.kcbbs.gen.nz/users/af/cyc.htm
Alexandria eGroup list -- http://www.kcbbs.gen.nz/users/af/alex.htm
Boundaries of Science http://www.kcbbs.gen.nz/users/af/scienceb.htm