I am currently constructing a generative soundscape that features drumming and possibly some ambient sounds. The idea is to use a neuroMeditation protocol:
increase fmTheta (FZ)
decrease Gamma (PZ)
At the moment I plan to reward increased/sustained Theta with the music/drumming becoming more repetitive (more focused) and reward decreased Gamma with some ambient sounds or perhaps some 3d (binaural) spatialisation.
I’m not aware of whether this has been done before, but I’m curious to hear the results of your experiment.
What rhythmic frequencies are you planning to use? I know there has been work done on the potentially consciousness-altering effects of repetitive sounds at particular frequencies, as used for example by various traditional healers, shamans, etc.
The NeuroMeditation protocols were added to the SuperCollider quark, currently on my computer only i.e. not pushed to github yet. The quark is based on the Processing code of the OpenBCI GUI. Hardware we (Fredik and I) use is OpenBCI Cyton, but it should work with Ganglion as well - needs testing.
After experimenting and feedback, I decided to remove the gamma reward and look into measuring phase coherence between locations. (It’s quite difficult to meditate and ‘work’ on being rewarded.)
The last tests with two participants had a synthesised chakapa sound when theta median on FZ went beyond a manually set threshold usually around 1.5 µV.
I tried to add the phase coherence feature for a performance, but only managed to add code that uses theta medians’ amplitude difference between P3-P4 and F3-F4. These differences were used to spatialise sound textures around the audience with a quad speaker setup. In other words the idea was to indicate which part of my brain is more active by moving sound around the listeners.
Correct! The current soundscape uses sonic driving deriving from the shamanic journey tradition, but is not specifically a shamanic journey. The entrainment starts from 6.6hz and slows down exponentially to 4hz i.e. the drumming (participants should focus on) starts on 6.6 beats per second and slows down to 4 beats per second. There is loads of literature for this.
The audio of the performance was recorded, mixed and currently used in a survey for online testing (offline EEG):
Thanks! Any feedback appreciated, k
ps: I just saw you are behind Autodidacts - great! How is the new OpenBCI enclosure coming along?
