Brainwave Chick IV
Brainwave Animation and Sound
Performance for Sonic Circuits VI
Walker Art Center, 1998
That BrainWave Chick is a collaborative music composition produced by Dr. Mark Applebaum and Paras Kaul. The 3-D model in the animatio was intended to be an abstract neuron and was designed by Joe Phoebus and Paras Kaul.
The Max Patch
A MAX software "patch," developed for this performance examined the brainwave (MIDI) activity. Events were left unchanged, filtered, distorted, transformed, or modulated by other events or tendencies, responded to, etc. By choosing what to play and how, the patch circumscribed the audio aesthetic. The patch was "played" with a continuous MIDI controller, through initial neural activity and by responses to aural articulations. Variable in this collaboration were the activities of the two individuals as well as the patch; these engender unpredictable results.
Projected animation sequences were used to represent states of mental activity. These color-coded sequences were triggered by brainwave switching among corresponding frequency domains (high beta, low beta, alpha, theta, and delta) by using a brainwave interface to the computer.
Brainwave Interface
The brainwave interface used for the performance iwas IBVA (Interactive Brainwave Visual Analyzer System). The composition was produced from Paras's neural activity, which was converted to MIDI data and transferred in real time to Applebaum's computer where the the data was modified by the Max Patch before being articulated by synthesizers. The interface utilizes standard EEG monitoring of neural activity and converts amplitudes of the signals to MIDI velocities, and frequencies to MIDI note numbers.