The Experience Helmet Translates Brainwaves Into Music

experience the helmet

Brains emit brainwaves and how would you like to listen to your own brainwaves? A London artist named Aiste Noreikaite has created a helmet that translates brainwaves into music. The Experience Helmet (which just looks like your ordinary motorcyclist helmet) uses EEG technology to make the music, transforming neurons’ activity into sound in real time and so creating an ‘audible reflection of one’s personal experience of the present moment’, according to the artist.

Inspired by Buddhist meditation practices, Noreikaite made this helmet by turning the data collected by the EEG wireless into sounds and finally settled on pure electronic signals to represent brainwaves. ‘I programmed sound frequencies a little bit differently in left and right sides so when they are heard together they produce a third frequency which can be heard just inside of our heads,’ explained Noreikaite. ‘User hears the sound that is being generated by his brainwaves. The brainwaves recognize themselves in that sound and reacts to it very positively, then this is looped back to them via sound again and again.

For the specialists, ‘the sounds are configured to produce ‘Binaural beats’ at 10Hz that synchronize user’s brain to alpha brainwave pattern’, and the experience may have in fact a therapeutic effect, as people had told her that they felt better after putting the helmet on… In the next phase of her project, Noreikaite wants to translate human emotions to sounds.

So does listening to our own internal music really make us feel better? I wouldn’t mind trying, as I am curious what kind of music my brain does, would it sound different when I am calm, anxious or angry? And does it sound like some Flying Lotus? Ha! that would be too good! But I always think it would sound like some a-melodic soundscape exploding in all direction at once. At least this is often my state of mind.