Sunday, March 18, 2012

Brain Waves Into Sound Waves

This Wired story is about a Japanese man who's come up with a way to turn his brain waves into sound waves. It looks to be more refined than what was talked about in this article from two years ago where a gaming device was hacked for a similar purpose. In both cases, though, the mechanism for the translation of brain waves into sound waves probably has as much to do with what's heard as the brain waves that trigger them.

The unusual musical instrument, which the musician had developed and built by a company called MKC, consists of the strange-looking headgear and a motherboard. Brain waves are picked up from the parietal and frontal lobes, then sent by radio waves to the motherboard, which converts the radio waves into a wave pulse that is output as sound.

The way he's using it sounds like bio-feedback.

Batoh said it takes practice to learn how to control one’s mind in a way that produces a pleasing sound.

It seems experiments like this point to a future with a whole new class of musical instruments.

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