January 7, 2013

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2013: A Brain Wave Symphony?

By Princess Ojiaku

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This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American

Just about everyone appreciates music, but music that results from a creative implementation of sound can be especially compelling. Human beings are inventive creatures who discover a myriad of ways to innovate in the musical realm. This video preview of Landfill Harmonic, a documentary shot in a slum in Paraguay shows that people can find ways to make music even in less-than-ideal conditions.

While kids in Paraguay are making music out of garbage, researchers in China are making music out of brain activity. Back in 2009, the authors of "Scale-Free Brain-Wave Music from Simultaneously EEG and fMRI Recordings" used electroencephalography or EEG as a basis for the composition of music. EEG involves measuring the brain's electrical activity through the scalp via a cap that looks like this:

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Recording from the brain in this manner results in waveforms that represent the electrical activity of distinct groups of neurons in the cortex. The authors used the period of the EEG waveform to represent the duration of a musical note, the amplitude of the waveform to represent the pitch of the note, and the average power change of the waveform to represent the volume (intensity) of the music. The group was able to produce music from EEG brain recordings by following this formula. However, the music that resulted from this analysis rapidly changed in volume which made for suboptimal listening. In order to solve this problem, the researchers added recordings from functional brain imaging, or fMRI, to control the volume instead of using the EEG waveform power change. By recording from the brain using simultaneous EEG and fMRI, the researchers correlated the volume of their brain-derived compositions to the BOLD signal of the fMRI. The result of using fMRI as a volume control was music with less erratic shifts in volume than the solely EEG-derived music.

Take a listen to the results below.

About Princess Ojiaku

Hey there! I'm a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin Madison in the Neuroscience and Public Policy program. I'm also a musician who played in two bands in North Carolina, one called Pink Flag and another called Deals. My personal passions are science, music, and cycling as transportation.

I got into science as a kid while tagging along and watching my mom do experiments in her lab. I found that while I loved science, I didn't want to be alone in an ivory tower, crunching data that few others would understand. I also noticed that many other people thought science was this scary and incomprehensible entity of obscurity. When I realized that there were people working to make science fun and accessible to everyone, I knew that this was exactly what I wanted to do. The two things I find the most immensely interesting and continually impressing are music and neuroscience, so these are the topics that I'll focus on in my blog. Philosophy and politics are my second loves, so I might pop in an occasional post on these topics as well. Ultimately I am here to share things that give me wonder. I hope that reading Science with Moxie gives you a bit of that wonder too.

More by Princess Ojiaku

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