EEG Final Product

We wanted to use the EEG brain wave detector but iDat only had one and another group was using it so we just created our own data, (Simon said we could) and Ian and Stuart used that data and gave each of the brain wave state a value with an added variable. 

The variables we used were 

• Size- Colour
• Position- Number of trees
• Brain state- Soundtrack

This is what is looked like once the programmed was run.

Screenshot taken by Stuart Westgate

My job in the group was to come up with 4 soundtracks for each of the brain waves states. 

I took a few royalty free songs, samples and beats I found, I recorded a few hits and beats of some objects in my room, because I wanted a very natural sound when it came to the music. Since we are using brain waves and having a very natural visual, I thought it would work quite nicely. I then played around with them, mixed them in Audacity and Pro Tools to make the 4 tracks and sent them to Stuart. 
I quite enjoyed this project more then the others as I actually put my music taste and ability to the test and it came out rather well. The others were happy with my end products as well, a rather hassle free group and project. 

• The first melody was to represent the Delta brain was as it had no beat, and could be used to portray deep sleep or no movement.
• The second melody had a little beat to it and was to represent Theta, it had not a lot of bass to it so it portrayed a relaxed feeling.
• The third melody had bass in it and portray Alpha brain waves so as to be in a mental and physical relaxation.
• And the fourth melody was more upbeat than the rest and portrayed a state of awareness and high brain activity. The Beta brain waves. 

Final Product

Video taken by Ian Marsh

The idea behind the representation of the variables was, even when you are resting or sitting down the neurons and veins are all still active.

As soon as the user changes brain state the soundtracks that represents calm, suddenly change to a higher up beat track, and that variable changes the soundtrack and onscreen pattern change, and repeat until the user has reached a different mind state.

The sudden pattern change also represents the creation and death of neuron connections in the brain. Trillions of new connections and old connections die throughout someones life. The sudden changing and multiple soundtracks represent the change of thoughts, and the sheer capacity of information that can travel through the human brain all at once. 

Research on brains

Brainwaves

The human brain is made up of billions and billions of cells called neurons, which used electricity to communicate with each other (that's what the Matrix is all about, well probably). The combination of millions of neurons sending signals to each other at once produces an enormous amount of electricity  just for an automatic ability like breathing can cause the brain to fire a large amount of electricity around, so what do you think what would happen in your brain if you were exercising.  
We can measure the electrical activity in your brain by using sensitive medical equipment (medical experts call it an EEG), measuring electrical levels over the scalp. 




The combination of your brains electrical activity is called a 'Brainwave pattern', the pattern emits tiny electrochemical impulses of different frequencies. The brain wave patterns are split up into 4 different groups which are known as - 

•  Beta- emitted when we are alert , or we feel tense, afraid or agitated. The frequency ranges from 13-60 pulses per second. 
•  Alpha- When we are in a state of a physical and or mental relaxation, although we are aware of what is going on around is. The frequency is around 7-13 pulses per second.
•  Theta- This is a state of reduced consciousness, say you are drowsy or thinking of sleep. The frequency is around 4-7 pulses per second.
•  Delta- This occurs when you are unconscious  deep sleep or even in a coma. The frequency is 0.1-4 pulses per second. 

"A typical neurone makes a bout ten thousand connections to neighbouring neurones. Given the billions of neurone's, this means there are as many connections in a single cubic centimetre of brain tissue as there are stars in the Milky Way."  

- David Eagleman

Project 3 are GO!

Live Data

Right so yea, we did historical data last project so now we are using live data. We will make a 'make use of a near real-time message passing infrastructure to access the data'...

Sources of Life Data- 

• Biological
• Environmental
• Financial
• Social
• And pretty much anything that changes quickly and is important

This could be examples of weather, the stock exchange, animal movement or behaviour, ocean tides etc. The list goes on and on, this technology is very open. 

The best example of live data I've found so far is this video.

OgilvyOne London connected Heathrow's live air traffic control data and live scores from the Wimbledon Tennis Championship, and mashed it up with players' nationalities to create live, useful, customised messages for departing passengers at Terminal 5.

The Idea and Concept 

The Team

• Stuart- Programming/Concept Design
• Ian- Programming/Concept Design
• Natalie- Research/Concept Design
• Me- Audio/Sound/Concept Design

The idea of the project is to control live data feeds using your senses or other variables. After much debating and discussing we decided to create a visualization with sound and audio to represent growth using movement. Growth represented by tree's, so the more active the brain is, the bigger the tree's will grow and the more amount of them there will be. 

This is how active the brain is in its various modes.

• Beta 15-30Hz > Normal, awake brain patterns
• Alpha 9-14Hz > Relaxed and calm brain patterns
• Theta 4-8Hz > Deep relaxation or problem solving brain patterns
• Delta 1-3Hz > Sleep brains patterns

RSSIV Final Product

Final Product

Here is our final product, even though you only see a small portion of the RSS feed working with our work, there are 10 other visuals and many more different audio's. If you want to see the final product in full then give me a shout. 

Group 2

So me and Natalie have joined forces to create something epic, we have decided to go with temperature and light feeds. We like them.

Team- Me- Visual/Programming
      Natalie- Audio/Visual

My suggestion is that we go with movie and documentary explosion scenes, Natalie agreed. Don't we make an amazing team! I am going to handle the visual, Natalie handle the audio. We thought about this for a long time, some big explosion music would be too easy, same as just some standard dramatic music, that isn't the iDAT way! So we just started making stupid random explosion noises and that's how we came up with our idea but making the audio by ourselves without computer or mixing aid. 
The audio is changed by wind speed, the faster the wind speed the louder the audio will be. And with the visuals, they are determined by the temperature, the hotter the temperature is outside the bigger the explosion will be (we thought this was a nice touch). 

I researched a lot of action movie explosions, went through a lot. And I mean a lot.

Here are my top video's- 

• Hospital's Explosion by The Joker

• Independence Day White House Explosion Scene 
• The Expendables

And of course...

• Gangyam Style Explosion

Those are the movie explosions, I wanted to throw in some documentary war explosions as well for a mix so Natalie found some. I can't upload them, to upload them all would take quite a while and they aren't on Youtube but you can possibly see them in our final product.