Make music with your brain
The encephalophone is an instrument you can play with your mind, just by thinking.
IN April of 2 016, Seattle choir director and fifth-grade teacher Margaret Haney checked into the emergency room with an unusual problem – suddenly, she couldn’t sing.
Haney had been in the classroom, trying to lead her students through George Gershwin’s
Summertime when, as she put it, “I failed miserably, like I never have ... my students were giving me some funny looks.”
She skipped on to Oh, What A
Beautiful Mornin’ but said she “couldn’t find the notes to save my life – and it’s a song I’ve been singing since I was four years old.”
Haney thought she’d had a stroke, even though she showed no other symptoms: no physical weakness, no sagging in her face, no slurring. The physicians ordered some brain scans and discovered she was suffering from “amusia” – the inability to make music – due to a viral encephalitis infection in one section of her brain.
After the tests, she was referred to Dr Thomas Deuel, a Swedish neurologist who plays trumpet and guitar, studied musical composition and molecular biology at Princeton University, and then jazz at New England Conservatory in Boston.
One of Dr Deuel’s fellow physicians knew her music-minded colleague would want to see Haney – and might be able to help her with an unusual invention.
Dr Deuel had been working with DXARTS, a University of Washington programme that incubates collaborations between scientists and artists. DXARTS was launched in 2 001, with an emphasis on projects that boldly criss-cross borders: video, performance, music, virtual reality, robotics and all-around tech-art hacking.
Lately, Dr Deuel had advised DXARTS on building a lab, with state-of-the-art technology to study the relationship between neurology and art (particularly music), and explore deep connections between the body and the brain.
Dr Deuel had also teamed up with UW-based physicist Felix Darvas on a neuro-musical invention: the encephalophone, an instrument you can play simply by thinking.
Haney, Dr Deuel said, “was a one-in-a-million case” who had the precise kind of brain lesion that might be ameliorated – though his hopes for a total cure were slim – with the encephalophone.
New frontiers
Dr Deuel had helped invent the encephalophone with a doubleedged purpose: to explore new frontiers in music technology and as a possible therapeutic tool for people who’d suffered from strokes or neurological problems like ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease).
If people couldn’t use their limbs to make music anymore, maybe learning to make music in a new way, with different parts of their brains, could serve as a method of neurological rehabilitation. One advantage, Dr Deuel said, is that “it’s totally non-invasive: no surgery. And it’s portable.”
To play the encephalophone, a musician wears an electroencephalogram (EEG) cap fitted with electrodes that read brain waves and transmit them to a synthesiser. The EEG caps looks like a beanie without the propeller but protrudes a cluster of wires hooked up to amplifiers and computers. The instrument is a kind of “braincomputer interface,” and sounds like an electric piano, electric strings, or whatever other kind of music the connected synthesiser can produce.
Scientists have been studying brain-computer interfaces since the 1970s, developing technologies that communicate between wired brains and external devices that, for example, allow people – or, in some studies, monkeys – to move screen cursors or robot arms with brain signals alone.
Other musicians and scientists have used EEG technology to make sound before, Dr Deuel said, but only “passively generated sound” based on brain activity. The encephalophone, he explained, is “an EEG-controlled musical instrument.”
The instrument is still in its early experimentation phases. Dr Deuel and his collaborators – including DXARTS co-founders Juan Pampin and Richard Karpen – are waiting for approval from the University of Washington to test the encephalophone in clinical trials, both to see whether making music improves patients’ quality of life and whether it might even help them improve their motor skills.
When Dr Deuel met Haney, he hoped the neuro-instrument could help her relearn how to sing.
Inside musicians’ heads
The encephalophone is just one part of the brain-music research underway at DXARTS, where Dr Deuel is also affiliate professor.
Before Dr Deuel began working with Haney, Pampin (a composer from Argentina) had already been overseeing what he calls a “brainart initiative”. The DXARTS lab, Pampin said, has built up a small arsenal of high-precision machines to map a range of bio-neural activity: brain waves; the arm muscles of musicians while they play; how eyes move in response to stimuli; the bioelectrical activity on a person’s skin, in a technology also used for polygraph tests.
Members of the renowned New York City-based JACK Quartet, for example, have been coming to DXARTS to wear EEG caps while playing together – or listening while colleagues play, or just thinking through a piece of music they know intimately.
“Great musicians,” said Karpen, “can do things with their minds and bodies with a deep intelligence – that doesn’t mean they’re better people or anything like that, of course. But think of it this way:
Most of us can throw a football, but most of us can’t throw a football for 80 yards to someone catching it on a dive. That’s a deep mind-body connection.”
In one previous experiment, a violinist wore an EEG cap while listening to a viola player. When the violist began to play faster, the violinist’s brain lit up with excitement. “If we tell the musicians to play certain notes together,” Pampin said, “all of them get a high level of alpha waves that are not correlated exactly, but they’re similar.” (Alpha brain waves have been affiliated with easing symptoms of depression and epilepsy.)
While the musicians play, Pampin explained, they hear biofeedback tones: a synthetic sound, based on their own brain waves, that gets calmer and slower as they become more relaxed. And as they respond to the sound of themselves becoming more relaxed they, in turn, become even more relaxed.
DXART’s split focus between music and science creates “a healthy tension” between the collaborators, Dr Deuel said.
The encephalophone’s EEG cap primarily charts electrical activity in the brain’s motor cortex. “When you move your right arm, the motor cortex is engaged and I can see that with the EEG,” Dr Deuel explained. “But when you just think about moving your arm, the same signal happens – even if you’ve had a stroke or Lou Gehrig’s disease and think about moving your arm, I can see it.”
With a little practice, a musician thinking about moving an arm or hand in one way – say, extending or contracting fingers, or thinking about moving an arm up or down – can move notes up or down an eight-tone scale.
Electrical signals caused by those thoughts (or by those actions) move from the brain through the EEG cap. Those signals are then transferred to one computer (which processes the signals), then to another computer, which turns the signals into sound for a synthesiser.
“It takes training,” Dr Deuel said. “We’re not at the place where we can show you a score by Beethoven and get it right all the time. But you have real control. It’s not random.”
With more research and fine-tuning, patients like Haney, who’ve lost the ability to make music with one part of the brain, might be able to use the encephalophone to train themselves to make music using other parts and processes of their brains.
“You have to learn to use the instrument,” Pampin emphasised, like training your brain to play a trumpet or guitar.
In some ways, Dr Deuel explained, EEG technology is crude: “If you’re looking through a greased glass pane and someone’s walking around, you can see that someone is moving or not moving, but you probably can’t see their facial features and tell who they are. That’s where EEG technology is now.”
But unlike magnetic resonance imaging which takes high-resolution snapshots of the brain at one moment in time, EEG technology can reveal what the brain is doing while it’s doing it.
“The EEG,” Pampin said, “is a little bit of a time machine.” – The Seattle Times/Tribune News Service