Art made by reading my mind: A Proof of Concept

Awhile ago, a friend said something on twitter to the effect of "I
dreamed about making art last night, does that count?". His question
got me thinking: "I thought I saw for sale a headset that claimed to
read your brainwaves (alpha, beta, theta, gamma, etc) and used them to
play video games. I wonder if I can record my brainwaves to make art
while I sleep with that?"

Well, the answer was/is yes: I got the Mindset from Neurosky a few
months ago and it turns out they have an API. It's sort of a royal
pita to use, but it works. I just finished writing a simple server for
it as well as a custom Quartz Composer patch that serves as a client.
The patch outputs the signals from the headset every second or so
(trying to get it to update more frequently, but it's complicated.)

I used the brain waves patch in combination with audio input to record this short democlip.

There are 6 base x,y,z coordinates and 6 RBG inputs to this that are
all (along with some other minor attributes) driven by my brain waves
while I was recording it. The spin, line length, line count, and a
couple of other inputs are driven by the music. It's interestingly
recursive because, theoretically, my brainwave patterns are influenced
by what Im watching...which it the combined output of my recently
previous brainwaves and the music. :)

At any rate, it is just a Proof of Concept - the viz is very simple -
but you can probably see some fun place to take it.

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• demo
• quartz composer
• brain waves
• mind reading
• neurosky
• mindset
• visualization
• music
• art