We have seen innovative technologies in the medical field that used the brainwaves in order to improve the life of people who suffer from mobility disabilities or other illnesses. But recently, the same technology has been merged with art, thus creating the world's first orchestra that generates music only through the performers' brain signals, BBC reveals.

The project has been developed by the Synthetic, Perceptive, Emotive and Cognitive Systems (SPECS) group at the University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona and it calls itself “The Multimodal Brain Orchestra.” The world premiere of the orchestra was performed last month in Prague, closing the Science Beyond Fiction conference.

“What we want to show here is the use of your brain without your body,” said Anna Mura, a biologist who is also the producer of this project. “Only recently we have come to appreciate more the tight coupling between mind, brain and body," Paul Verschure, head of the project, told the audience. “But we can wonder what the mind and brain would be capable of if it would be directly interfaced to the world, bypassing the body.”

The orchestra's members were four performers, an “emotional conductor” and a traditional one. They played a piece called Xmotion, composed by Jonatas Manzolli. "There is a first violin, a second violin and so on, except that instead of violins they are brains," says Dr. Mura.

This was achieved by fitting the performers with electrodes caps that take a real-time EEG (electroencephalograph), an image of the brain's electrical activity. As a result, the four could launch sounds affecting their frequencies and modulations based on the effects seen in their EEGs: the steady-state visually evoked potential (SSVEP), and the P300 signal.

The performers were given different tasks, like looking for a particular letter on a screen or simply watching a box with four flashing lights. The brain signals collected were the ones that changed the music and video in time with their reactions. The “emotional conductor” had, of course, a more “emotional experience.” She was shown images created by artist Behdad Rezazadeh, through a pair of virtual reality glasses, while her heart rate and skin conductance were measured. This controlled the visual experience showed to the public on a screen accordingly to her mood changes.

The experiment's main goal is not only understanding how the human mind and brain are connected, but also trying to explain what consciousness is all about.


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