Hello, my name is Duncan Williams. I'm at the Acoustics Research Center at the University of Salford in Manchester.
This would have been a poster presentation at NIME about a system called MINDMIX.
MINDMIX is a system which uses the electroencephalograph, in other words,
brain activity, in order to map particular features of brain activity
to audio mixing controls inside of DAW.
This will just take perhaps 2 minutes
and hopefully it would encourage you to reach out and speak to me about how the system works,
or to look up a couple of other videos of the system being used in the background.
First of all, here's what the paper actually looks like, so you can see it in the Proceedings.
The full title is "Mapping brain activity to congruent audio mixing features".
And, although the system actually works, really what the paper is about is about
evaluating the kinds of features we use and the kinds of
audio mixing parameters we want to control. Because there's a big disconnect between
mixing features in a DAW and brain activity patterns.
I'm particularly interested in how we might use
evaluation strategies to determine the best use cases
for these kinds of biophysiological controls when we have systems like this.
One of the big advantages of a system like this is that it might help, for example, people with
problems accessing traditional DAW software to have access to music making and music production.
Unfortunately, because of the video capture software I'm using, I can't show you the system working fully with sound and video,
but what you would have seen here is a short video of some electroencephalogram data being measured from the scalp
and being filtered into various spectral and temporal bands.
Here we can see some of that filtering on the right hand side.
In particular, we have alpha and beta bands with the beta band being slightly more prominent than the alpha band in this case.
And then some Max MSP codes to do some filtering and some other spectral stuff before we map these brain activity parameters
to some DAW controls in Reaper underneath.
So here we have some MIDI Machine Control style messages being generated
in order to move faders inside the DAW.
But if you read the paper,
you'll see why I think that isn't a particularly good idea and why I think that certain other types of EEG feature
are best mapped to these kinds of music control parameters.
I won't spoil the paper and as this was only going to be a poster anyway,
I won't make the video too much longer,
other than to say if you want to see a video of me using a similar kind of system,
there's a URL here which will show you the use of the electroencephalograph
to generate MIDI messages, which are then played back by, in this case, a Disklavier piano.
If you want to know more or to discuss these ideas further with me or to have a person-to-person demo,
please feel free to contact me.
Here are my details. My email, as you can see, is d.a.h.williams@salford.ac.uk.
My website is www.duncanwilliams.info or tweet me @duncancipher.
Thanks for your time and I look forward to hearing from you over the virtual conference. Cheers.