Brain Music: Not Much to Dance To

Brain Music: Not Much to Dance To
By Michelle Delio

TORONTO -- A happy brain hums.

A stressed-out brain makes static sounds. A mildly concerned brain produces a noise that sounds like breakfast cereal melting in milk. An interested brain sounds like a jumpy cat emitting a steady, low-level purr interspersed with a few high-pitched squeals.
Hook a whole bunch of brains up to a computer, capture and play the sounds they make, and you get, well, not quite music, but certainly some interesting noise.

That's exactly what happened at the Cyborg Echoes Deconcert in Toronto over the weekend.
The concert was billed as a participatory event, and it certainly was: Audience members' brains were scanned, the scans were transformed into sounds, mixed with a solid little backbeat from some heart scans, combined and played back to create Music in the Key of EEG.
Deconcert, held at Toronto's Deconism Gallery, was based on James Fung's research on biofeedback techniques.

Several hundred people crowded into the small gallery space where ominous-looking hooks, cables, suction cups and clamps dangled from the glass ceilings and white walls. Knowing the machinery was going to record your brain activity certainly added an interesting twist to the gallery visit.

The concert began with a deep breathing meditation. (Evidently, the human brain makes better music when it's in a deeply relaxed alpha state.)

When the brain is busy it generates beta waves, which look like scratchy little marks on an EEG printout and are too shallow to make good music. Alpha waves are strong and steady.
Three sets of music played at the Deconcert. First, the technology was explained during a trial run, and some volunteers were hooked up to the scanning system. Audience members were then connected to the concert system by way of electrodes clamped on each ear. Another electrode was attached to headbands and positioned over the backs of their skulls to grab signals from their occipital lobes, the part of the brain responsible for processing visual information.
FlexComp EEG concentrators captured the brainwaves. FlexComp can grab signals sent from human muscles and brain waves, as well as capture data on heartbeat, respiration and perspiration. That information is fed into a PC and can be presented using a spreadsheet, text file or other application.

Fung used his own software to combine the brain waves and transform them into sound. One of the concert's sponsors, Thought Technologies, a Montreal-based company that makes computerized biofeedback devices primarily for medical uses, made the EEG tools.
For the second set, people were divided into groups of eight. When each group's brain waves had been captured, the individual sounds were played to the audience, "sort of like an orchestra tuning up," Fung said.

During the final set, the sounds created from each group's brain waves were averaged out and then combined into a sort of mind-meld musical overture.

So what does brain-wave music sound like? The final cut revealed a cute little tune with all the drawbacks of digitally produced music. In other words, it's brainy, but it's got no soul.

The concert was part of a weekend-long series of events centered on the idea that the body in its present form has pretty much become obsolete. We've all become cyborgs, part human and part machine.

"Humans are now a combination of cyborg and zombie. The body has been augmented, changed, invaded, occupied -- and that's fine," said Australian performance artist Stelarc. "The body can now be used as a host for technology that allows us to share, interface, upload and access ideas."
But, you might argue, bodies can still do one thing better than computers. Stelarc begged to differ, happily describing the joys of virtual sex, performed while hooked up to machines that stimulate the appropriate body parts however and exactly as the brain desires.

"Sounds pretty great, and I'd love to try it, but over time I think I'd miss the element of surprise," said Ian McCormick, a student who attended the concert.

Celebrated Canadian cyborg Steve Mann, who co-founded the MIT Media Lab's Wearable Computing Project and now teaches engineering at the University of Toronto, was also in attendance but spent an awful lot of time seemingly talking to himself.

It turned out he was simultaneously delivering a speech at the Ad Astra Sci-Fi convention and attending the Deconcert. Ad Astra's event was going on about an hour's drive away.
Mann beamed his talk to the convention using his "eyetap," a mini-camera and tiny computer mounted on a pair of glasses that lets him record and broadcast live video feeds straight from his eyes to the Internet.

Mann, who has spent most of his life designing and constructing devices that allow him to stay connected 24 hours a day and broadcast his life to the world in real time, said without "humanistic intelligence" technology is neither fun nor useful.

He cautioned the Deconcert audience to think about what technology they allow into their lives and how they interface with it.

"Use it, don't let it use you," Mann said.

Article May Be Found @: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,58193-0.html?tw=wn_story_page_prev2