EEG in

[John Speth]

I'll second Barry's remark about how uninteresting EEG "music" sounds.  As I
mentioned yesterday, you can get a very pricey EEG to MIDI from a company
called WaveRider.  And they also supply a nice demo application on their web
site.  This demo happens to contain actual MIDI data that was generated by
their EEG->MIDI setup.  So you can get a true recorded performance of what
one would sound like.

I do think that EEG music is still a pretty cool idea.  I got a report from
a guy who watched and listened a live demo of the WaveRider at a NAMM show a
few years ago.  The performer did Tai Chi (sp?) while plugged into a synth
and he said it was fun to watch as well as hear.  So it does work and I'll
bet results will vary depending on mood and even the humidity in the air,
etc.

It seems to me that to best use EEG music you'd need to make a pretty heavy
investment in some kind of intelligent software that will learn on the fly
so it can pick out the best information in an EEG stream and using this info
to control equipment.  I'm guessing that most of the information in an EEG
stream is always changing and just plain noise, both electrical and
biological.  Quite the research project if you ask me.

John Speth
Object Engineering, Inc
mailto:johns at oei.com


> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-synth-diy at mailhost.bpa.nl
> [mailto:owner-synth-diy at mailhost.bpa.nl]On Behalf Of Barry L Klein
> Sent: Thursday, September 10, 1998 12:21 PM
> To: SYNTH-DIY at mailhost.bpa.nl
> Subject: RE: Re: EEG in
>
> I've gone to a few digital media "events" that had avante garde artists
> from all over and a couple of them did use EEG control for their work.
> But I sure didn't care much for the bleeps and such that were the result
> of it.