SPOTLIGHT
They Call It NeuroDisco
told me on a Skype call from London, she
wondered, “what if I included flashing lights?”
That’s when she paired up with Chung-Hay
Luk, a fellow neuroscientist from Cal who
focused much of her time on wearable technology, predominantly using LED lights that she
could command with an Arduino, a simple and
inexpensive single-board microcontroller.
Once this idea came together, the two scientists told me, it was an easy next step to add
sound to mimic the action potential in a cell.
That’s when they brought in composer Richard
Warp, Erica’s husband. Several LEDs later, and
a few iterations of coat hangers, chicken wire,
papier mâché, and latex, and they had the early
stages of NeuroDisco: lights that pulsed with
music, and a brain cell that towered over visitors.
By Larissa Zimberoff
Contributor
The YouTube video showed a spiky, glowing
shape that emanated colors and a girl pumping
her fists next to it. It looked like she was underwater or at a rave. The lighting was otherwise
dark and the screen was filled with dancers
moving around to an ambient beat. The DJ, also
pumping his fists, was seated in front of a laptop. Across the screen read the message: “Smile
you’re on EEG.” Strapped around the DJ’s head
was a sci-fi-looking headset. The video was
taken at Maker Faire, and the DJ was actually
the “EEGJ,” a term that is half joke, half reality.
He was controlling the music with his mind.
NeuroDisco, as its creators call the mindmusic system, began with a superhuman-sized
brain cell created by Erica Warp, a neuroscientist trained at UC Berkeley. The cell was
for an interactive learning event for kids at
the California Academy of Sciences in January
2013. While she was fabricating the cell, Warp
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“Matching music to human function has,
for some years now, been a central part of my
practice,” Richard Warp told me. For many
reasons, he focused on electroencephalography
(EEG), which allows for the recording of electrical activity in the brain. Up until recently,
this could only be accessed with a medical grade
EEG device, which Richard Warp first utilized
for “Music for Online Performer,” a project he
produced in 2010 with Tim Mullen, a colleague
from UCSD. The 256-channel EEG gave them
phenomenally accurate data, which they sent
over the web to a performance space in Huddersfield, England, to control robots that played
acoustic instruments in real time.
After the California Academy of Sciences
event, the team continued their collaboration,
and, with the added layer of Richard Warp’s
passion, they pushed what had begun as a science project into the art world. And, unlike
with his first project, there were finally EEG
solutions built for use outside of the hospital,
for HZ