Traditional electronic music relies on keyboards, knobs, and mouseclicks. But with an electrode-studded headband called the Cyberlink Interface, users can make music with their brainwaves.
At the final party this week at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas, Keith Secola and Wild Band of Indians demonstrated Brain Actuated Music as a part of their musical set. While the technology demonstrated was developed with more prosaic uses in mind, using it to make music showed how deeply changes in interfaces affect how users approach technology.
Developed by Dr. Andrew Junker, the headband, or Cyberlink Interface, uses three electrodes to sense 12 different biological signals derived from brain and muscle activity. It translates the signals into "brainfingers" and transmits them to a computer, controlling such technologies as Windows-based computer applications, screen cursors, and environmental controls. The interface proves especially useful for people with severe disabilities, providing a means to communicate where it didn't exist before.
Brain Actuated Music takes the interface in a different direction. Created in conjunction with composer and software engineer Chris Berg, it works with internal sound cards on Windows machines and external MIDI devices. The user's brainwaves modulate the music and its volume, pitch, melody, and rhythm.
"The magic is in the interface," said Chris Tate, a biomedical engineer at Brain Actuated Technologies. "It works much like a music sequencer or synthesizer would work. At any one moment, you can trigger at 20 different musical events ... one note or many notes in a sequence - either upon excitation or relaxation. So if you concentrate and bring up a certain frequency or bandwidth of brainwave, you trigger a musical sequence. Or if you relax and bring it down, it triggers a musical sequence."
Tate, who also manages Keith Secola and Wild Band of Indians, saw in Secola a means to bring Brain Actuated Music to the stage.
"I really wanted to see what would happen when an accomplished musician, songwriter, and organic player got a hold of this thing," Tate said. "And it seems to work great. He grasped it right away."
From an aesthetic perspective, the Cyberlink Interface fit Secola perfectly. "Keith's trademark is his headband," Tate explained. "It just clicked. I've been working with this technology for five or six years, and I always thought, 'How're we going to put this headband on somebody so that they don't look geeky on stage?'"
Secola brought his Native American rhythm and power chords to the party, opening his set with "The Meditative Flute." He created the piece especially to integrate Brain Actuated Music.
"It's pretty easy to mix it in with one of our songs like we did yesterday," Secola explained. "It seemed like the brain waves from playing the flute and the meditation was a very simple mix. We picked out some of that and put a drumbeat to it. By thinking thoughts and emotions, you can control the interface."
Using technology in his organic music reflects Secola's spiritual philosophy. "I think the new era we're ushering in is part of that cooperation between races, cooperation between science and spirituality. Any kind of interface with technology has to have that human spirit in it; it's got to something above it rather than just playing music on a machine."
Though Secola only folded Brain Actuated Music into one song, members of the audience found it worthwhile.
"I think that the mouse constrains us," Tamara Ford of the University of Texas' Advanced Communications Technology Laboratory said. "We've been at point and click for way too long."
