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for palliative care, in occupational therapy, and indeed in music therapy, in addition
to innovative applications in composition and music performance. It should be
mentioned, however, that although I have an avid interest in developing assistive
technology for medical and special needs, there are a number of potentially inter-
esting artistic uses of BCMI technology beyond such applications.
Plymouth University
s Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Music Research
(ICCMR) is a main protagonist of the
'
field of BCMI. This chapter reviews the
pioneering research we have been developing at ICCMR for over a decade. Our
approach is hands-on orientated. We often start by dreaming scenarios followed by
implementing proof-of-concept or prototype systems. Then, as we test these sys-
tems, we learn what needs to be further developed, improved, discarded, replaced
and so on. These often lead to new dreamed scenarios and the cycle continues
incrementally. In reality, as we shall see below, vision, practice and theory do not
necessarily take place sequentially in our research.
This chapter begins with a brief discussion introduction to the field and
approaches to BCMI. Then, it introduces two BCMI systems that my team and I
have designed in response to two dreamed scenarios:
1. Would it be possible to play a musical instrument with signals from the brain?
No hands used.
2. Would it be possible to build a BCMI system for a person with locked-in
syndrome to make music?
y discuss what I have learned from building these systems and
identify challenges for making further progress. I suggest that one of the pressing
challenges of BCMI research is to gain a better understanding of how the brain
processes music, with a view on establishing detectable meaningful musical neural
mechanisms for BCMI control. Then, I present two experiments aimed at gaining
some of such understanding: one addressing active listening and the other
addressing tonal processing. Each experiment is followed by an introduction to
work-in-progress prototypes that I developed in response to the dreamed scenarios
that emerged from the experiments.
Next, I brie
1.2
Background to BCMI
Human brainwaves were
first measured in the mid of 1920s by Hans Berger (
1969
).
Today, the EEG has become one of the most useful tools in the diagnosis of
epilepsy and other neurological disorders. In the early 1970s, Jacques Vidal pro-
posed to use the EEG to interface with a computer in a paper entitled
Toward Direct
Brain
-
Computer Communication
(Vidal
1973
). Many attempts at using the EEG as
a means to interface with machines followed with various degrees of success; for
instance, in early 1990s, Jonathan Wolpaw and colleagues developed a prototype of
a system that enabled primitive control of a computer cursor by subjects with severe
motor de
cits (Walpaw et al.
1991
).
