BRAINS MAKE BEAUTIFUL MUSIC
Our brains make music as well as appreciate it in ways we are just figuring out now. Recent scientific and creative experiments are yielding beautiful new art forms as well as medical and behavioral therapies.
Today, we explore musical art created by the electro-chemical systems of our brains.
In our previous post, New Sound Art You Can See, about cymatics, the visualization of sound, we explore how driving music, noise, and other sounds through physical liquid, plastic, or granular media, creates patterns we can see.
But Korean performance artist, Lisa Park (Yeon-Hee), has taken this further, by using electroencephalography (EEG) to generate the patterns, in a project called, Eunoia, which means “beautiful thinking,” in Greek. Purely by meditating, while wearing an EEG headset, which monitors her eye movements, as well as her alpha, beta, delta, and theta brainwaves, Park controls water patterns in a series of dishes that sit atop audio speakers sitting nearby. The nature of the patterns depends on whether she is thinking angry, sad, happy, or lustful thoughts.
Park, with a Masters in Professional Studies from the Interactive Telecommunications Program and New York University, uses programming software like Processing, Arduino, and Max/MSP to create art works. Her performance art frequently deals with psychological and behavioral themes such as vulnerability, confrontation, suspension, self-control, and liberation.
Musician, Masaki Batoh, uses electroencephalography (EEG) in a different way, to compose music which acts as a form of biofeedback, creating sound from brainwaves. His new album, Brain Pulse Music, compiled brain waves recorded from survivors of the Great East Japan Earthquake, to create haunting music, which not only tapped into memories but also served to heal the survivors.
Using an instrument called the Brain Pulse Music Machine, a modified EEG machine paired with headgear mounted with sensors attached to subjects’ earlobes, Batoh presented images of the earthquake to stimulate their brains. Data, produced by the EEG machine, was fed to an attached motherboard, which translated it into sound.
Batoh, formerly the lead of Ghost, the 1980s Japanese experimental rock band, designed this machine to help people to regain control over their lives after the disaster. As with traditional biofeedback, the immediate audio feedback, taught people to control the sound, and thereby control the mind, sending it into a meditative state, finding stillness in emotion.
Batoh also works at an acupuncture clinic in Toyko, which gives him additional insights into how the nervous system, connected to the brain, operates with synchrony and diachrony. As his patients poured into the clinic after the earthquake disaster, Batoh began to see the potential of sound-based biofeedback to heal.
Photo: Minoru Tsuyuki. BPM Machine transforms brain waves into music.
Brain Pulse Music is a collection dedicated to the victims of the earthquake and tsunami, including both BPM Machine recordings and traditional Japanese instruments. Batoh donates proceeds from the album to the Japanese Red Cross and his label, Drag City, will also be selling BPM Machines for $700 each, with proceeds going to help victims of the natural disaster
The music sounds like the stuff of early electronic theremin. OK, so you can’t really dance to it. But, music created by the Brain Pulse Music Machine might just make you feel like dancing, once again.
Video: Drag City
LISTEN: “EYE TRACKING TEST” BY MASAKI BATOH
Check out “Eye Tracking Test” — a song made with the device — above. Download the song here (free MP3; right-click and “Save As”) and watch Batoh’s demonstration of how to use the BPM in the video above.
Tod Machover, head of the Media Lab's Opera of the Future group, was one of the earliest innovators in the brain-music space. Machover composed the Brain Opera, one of five operas at the intersection of art and technology. Inventor of Hyperinstruments, a technology that uses smart computers to augment virtuosity, used by performers such as Yo-Yo Ma, Prince, and Peter Gabriel. Machover, examines ways to use music in therapy for emotionally and physically challenged individuals. Machover’s seminal work found, when working with Yo-Yo-Ma, that the body’s electricity affects the instruments a musician plays. In the past couple of decades, our understanding of this has multiplied exponentially, as illustrated by these new imaging and sensor technology.
Since then, MRIs have also recently been employed to delve into the art of beatboxing. Clicks, buzzes, whooshes, and pops created by tongues, lips, and palates, entertain us while they fascinate us by the range of what we humans can do with our mouths.
Recently, researchers at the University of Southern California’s Signal Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory have been using real-time Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to examine the “paralinguistic mechanisms” of beatboxing. It’s not exactly language, yet it communicates, in many ways, as if it were. It’s not exactly singing, yet we listen to it as we do other forms of vocal music.
Xhosa, one of the official languages of South Africa, spoken by over 7 ½ million people there, is a tonal language using dental, lateral and post-alveolar clicks, many of which are present in beatboxing.
Artists like “Human Beat Box,” Doug E. Fresh, display a genius level skill of producing and controlling sounds and rhythms with their mouths. And now, scientific research is explaining the linguistic connection.
Mouths sound like drums, cymbals, and other percussion instruments, that often mimic how we speak. As part of the study, which appeared in the February 2013 issue of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, the researchers observed a beatboxer in an MRI scanner he produced his range of percussion sounds. (See a video of a beatbox MRI in action below.) MRI videos of the performances were combined with his recorded vocals and the various effects and then analyzed to figure out how the artist’s mouth made each sound.
The art of hip-hop is now helping us to understand the art of speech.
Neuroscientists, Jing Lu and Dezhong Yao of China’s University of Electronic Science and Technology, in a study published in the online journal PLoS One, in China, are transforming brainwaves into music that mimics human compositions that sound like improvisational jazz piano.
Translating the brain’s electrical fluctuations to pitch, and blood flows to intensity, the mind becomes a cognitive symphony.
Using data from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) for intensity, better approximates the work of human composers, where pitch and intensity are largely independent of one another. According to the researchers, the EEG fMRI intensity evolution is smooth and relaxed, and the resultant EEG-fMRI sounds more like real man-made music.
The addition of the fMRI information to the composition process records information relating to brain cell energy consumption and neural activity, so the generated music is a sonic representation of the subject’s mental state. It is a new interactive link between the human brain and music. These findings could yield applications for clinical diagnosis and in biofeedback therapy.
Check in throughout the week for really cool posts about the beautiful brain as it creates and is impacted by other art forms, including visual, literary, film, and dance, including results of the 2013 Brain-Art Competition, presented by Neuro Bureau, announced later today.
