The EEGsynth
We are very happy to announce that we have been rewarded a considerable Kulturbryggan grant! With this grant we will develop way’s to fuse musician’s brains, furthering our interdisciplinary research in brain-synthesis. Specifically, we will create ways for people to ‘jam’ together, by connecting their EEG to sound equipment. It will allow anyone with a […]
The event started with a brief introduction about the technology that is used as well as the underlying scientific, artistic and philosophical ideas. The three of us also talked about how medical hypnosis changes the allocation of attention and modifies the regular functions of cognitive control. Before the event began, Hernan had hypnotised Jean-Louis. The […]
We did it! See below the first EEG real-time coded into audio and sent into space with the Dwinglo radiotelescope at ASTRON, The Netherlands. Many inspired experts worked hard on getting us this far. Next step is to prepare the public performances, hopefully starting in November. For more info stay tuned here and on Daniela’s […]
A performance at the Se2017 conferenceKarolinska Institutet, Stockholm, August 13, 2017 Probing the Mind of Berzelius is an interdisciplinary artistic performance that will take you on a sonic dive into the discovery of selenium 200 years ago. The performance is developed by neuroscientist Stephen Whitmarsh (NL) with musicians Jean-Louis Huhta (SWE) and Samon Takahashi (FR). […]
April 7-9, 2017 For two nights we stayed at the ASTRON radio telescope facility in Dwingelo, The Netherlands to develop the protocols for the COGITO performance envisioned by artist Daniela de Paulis. The primary goal of this meeting was to develop a paradigm in which high quality electroencephalography (EEG) is recorded while the participant is […]
On March 6th we held progress meeting of the Brain Control Club at CRI. We were happy to be joined by the GameLab and by three students from the interdisciplinary program on education technology who were interested in finding ways to include neuroscience in their exciting projects. The slides of the presentations can be found […]
This weekend, 1+1=3 had the opportunity to meet in Paris and spend a day updating each other and working out our plans for the future. Much has happened lately, and many exciting things will happen next year. First music release due in spring We have done the first EEG recordings of what will become the […]
It is 35 degrees outside, and probably even more in my little south-facing studio. So it is with a overheated brain that I am reading a recent communication by Bart Lutters and Peter J. Koehler in BRAIN, titled: Brainwaves in concert: the 20th century sonification of the electroencephalogram. Luckily it is short and sweet, and […]
We have just arrived in Los Angeles, USA, kicking off our USA tour where we will work and perform together, connect with other artists and academics, give talks, host a session at a conference and reconnect with old friends. First of all, we couldn’t have been able to get it all together with the people […]
We are very excited to meet other EEG hackers at BrainHack, Paris, February 24-26. Here are the outlines of our 5 minute scientific and artistic pitch: EEGsynth: scientific and development pitch Stephen Whitmarsh & Robert Oostenveld (presenters), Per Huttner & Jean-Louis Huhta We are very happy to be able to present to you the EEGsynth […]
We wish you a very happy new year! We had quite a year ourselves, and the future of the EEGsynth looks very promising indeed. I would like to give a short recap of where we are now, and where we will be focussing in terms of hardware/software development in the next couple of months. It […]
On the evening of October 15, 1+1=3 performed together with Carima Neusser for a small invited audience at Jean-Louis’ studio. Those who have followed the blog will know that for some time we have been developing the possibilities of the EEGsynth to use muscle activity as a control signal for sound synthesis. This was our […]
We had our first EEG-Synthesizer jam with a smoothly working setup! Quite a milestone! In the following video and SoundCloud recordings (removed), you hear several interesting and evocative synthesizer patches created by Jean-Louis that are fully controlled in real-time by the EMG signals from my hand and arm. So in fact, during the recordings Jean-Louis was […]
The EEG signal processing, classification and the translation into a control signal is done on a computer. This means that the computer needs to be able to send control signals to the synthesizer. There are in general two options for interfacing with a synthesizer: Midi and CV/Gate. Midi is a digital protocol over a serial […]
Today tested some potentially interesting locations for surface EMG. For each you’ll find a video below. Note that only the lower MATLAB frequency plot is informative: Flexors of fingers Flexor of thumb Biceps Contractor of forehead (surprise expression) All seemed quite specific to the intended muscle (group). Of great help was this website with suggested […]
I recorded a short demonstration of the EEGsynth using real-time recordings of heartbeat (ECG), muscle activity (EMG) and eyeblinks (EOG). Ofcourse the brain is just as possible, but harder to demonstrate on my own. Importantly, we can use any MIDI controller to change parameters in real-time, and use MIDI as a control signal for any […]
With: Jean-Louis Huhta, Stephen Whitmarsh and Per Hüttner August 19 Jean-Louis and Stephen arrive at midnight. Nocturnal swim and discussions about the individual work carried out in preparation for the workshop and what is expected of the days to come and how we can best reach these goals. August 20 Breakfast meeting and planning of […]
In France we tried to reproduce neuronal functions with the synthesiser and listened to the outcome. This was great fun and Stephen is a really talented supervisor. Since my thesis is on hemispheric specialization I choose one theory which tries to explain differences in hemispheric processing by splitting incomming signals into relative frequency bands. I […]
Did we mention already that we have been awarded a grant from Innovativ Kultur?
This week I co-organized a research retreat at a beautiful French chateau, for Christian Kell’s wonderful group (department of neurology of the Frankfurt University hospital). During the Saturday-night workshop I presented our project and explained and demonstrated some principles of sounds synthesis. We then set to work to create synthesizer patches that simulated neuronal mechanisms of cognitive processes. […]
This week, thanks to Robert’s work on the openbci to fieldtrip-buffer (see previous post), I was able to record the first EEG using the OpenBCI system during a research retreat in France, with Christian Kell’s wonderful group (brainclocks.com). It took some time to figure out the pin setup on the board, but we finally ended […]
I compiled the openbci2ft application on the Raspberry Pi without any problem. The openbci2ft application interfaces the OpenBCI board with the FieldTrip buffer, which is a network transparent interface to real-time EEG data and which supports MATLAB, Python, Java and C/C++ interfaces to the data stream. The openbci2ft application is implemented as ANSI-C application, as […]
Yesterday my 32-bit OpenBCI board arrived. Today I have been working most of the day to get it to work with FieldTrip, which is my preferred rapid application development and data analysis platform based on MATLAB. OpenBCI comes with some example software. I was able to get the Processing example application up and running in […]
We are targeting the development at affordable EEG hardware and specifically have the OpenBCI system in mind. A 3D printed headset has been constructed in the OpenBCI project, but that is not (yet) easily available. Hence I am currently exploring some ideas for electrode attachment on my own. Although easy to put on, a hard-plastic headset is not trivial to […]
Last night I talked for hours with my dear friend David Holmes – a true thinker and inventor, expert in music and meditation, and uniquely talented writer (see his wonderful book on the mind, brain and its intimate relationship to sound and light). It was a crash course on harmonics, timbre, resonance, overtones and the […]
Robert has been busy programming the first MATLAB-MIDI interface, in both directions. You can find the code on the Github repository. Here you can see him playing his MIDI piano using the MATLAB GUI that he made. And here the MIDI piano is played, displayed on the MATLAB GUI.
For the purpose of developing the Python code, I’ve installed Virtual Box, on which I installed CentOS 6.6. I had an impossible time getting the Guest Additions installed, which are needed to be able to map USB ports, until I found a site with Virtual Box images with Guest Additions pre-installed. I then downloaded the […]
We plan to develop the final EEG-synth user-interface in Python for several reasons: It can be run on the Raspberry Pi (on the Debian-based Rasbian operating system), with is our target system for the final ‘product’ It has a great number of libraries for numerical calculations, serial and MIDI interfacing, and graphical display It has […]
Think Python, How to Think Like a Computer Scientist by Brian Downey Synthesizer Cookbook by Fred Welsh Make: Analog Synthesizers by Ray Wilson Thomas pointed out these fantastic posters with synthesizer basics To get some (virtual) experience with modular synths I installed LiveProfessor, a free VST host. In this, I installed the Fre(a)koscope VTS plugin, […]
Robert had the great idea that, at least for now, we don’t have to solder our own control panel, but could start using a MIDI controller board. Brilliant! Today friend and collaborator Tomas Nordmark has very kindly borrowed me two FaderFox MIDI controllers! So stoked! I’ve learned that MIDI is not only a matter of […]