4 ms·

Been thinking about something else: stream music that's playing in your head now, so that others can hear it. No AI, no "adaptive" crap, just what's being compo

by mojuba 11y ago

Been thinking about something else: stream music that's playing in your head now, so that others can hear it. No AI, no "adaptive" crap, just what's being composed in your mind right now. Whether this is typical or not I'm not sure, but I almost always have some music playing in my head, which I can't always transform into a track, as I'm just a hobbyist music maker, not a pro. If I were rich I'd establish a big fat prize for this technology, seriously.

nemo1618 11y ago
I imagine that would be quite difficult. As far as I'm aware, we currently do not know if your brain is doing the same thing as mine when we hear songs in our respective heads. So first you have the problem of extracting the information. But then you have the potentially bigger problem of translating the information! We can be fairly sure that when you hear music in your head, nothing is actually vibrating in your head to produce the sound. My guess is that you have a bank of "instrument memories" and "note memories," and you can imagine new music by smashing a note memory into an instrument memory. (Similarly, try to imagine President Obama saying "My fellow Americans: even electronic brain pancake crystal elderly." It's surprisingly easy to combine your memories of his voice with your bank of known words.) But what guarantee is there that my instrument memories are the same as yours, or that they are stored in the same way? The mapping is not clear.
- egypturnash 11y ago
  If your "instrument/note memories" thesis is correct, then it's not too hard to imagine that Brainr's initial setup would involve a calibration process to work out what your* particular mapping of sound memories is shaped like. * to give this putative "plays the music in your head" app a terrible name
pierrec 11y ago
I've also dreamed about such a thing, which would open new worlds for performance and composition. I think the technology isn't even remotely close to allowing this, though. The closest I can think of is research that has been done where MRI imaging and analysis were used to reconstruct images being watched by a subject. Results were very rough, though: http://news.berkeley.edu/2011/09/22/brain-movies/ http://news.berkeley.edu/2011/09/22/brain-movies/ And you have to consider that nonexistent music playing in your head has a special "unfinished" quality that might make it impossible to just translate into sound. My take is that when you process sound, it goes through multiple layers or depths of analysis, and imagined music takes place at an already deep level of analysis - could be very problematic for this project.

by mojuba 11y ago

nemo1618 11y ago

I imagine that would be quite difficult. As far as I'm aware, we currently do not know if your brain is doing the same thing as mine when we hear songs in our respective heads. So first you have the problem of extracting the information. But then you have the potentially bigger problem of translating the information! We can be fairly sure that when you hear music in your head, nothing is actually vibrating in your head to produce the sound. My guess is that you have a bank of "instrument memories" and "note memories," and you can imagine new music by smashing a note memory into an instrument memory. (Similarly, try to imagine President Obama saying "My fellow Americans: even electronic brain pancake crystal elderly." It's surprisingly easy to combine your memories of his voice with your bank of known words.) But what guarantee is there that my instrument memories are the same as yours, or that they are stored in the same way? The mapping is not clear.

egypturnash 11y ago
If your "instrument/note memories" thesis is correct, then it's not too hard to imagine that Brainr's initial setup would involve a calibration process to work out what your* particular mapping of sound memories is shaped like. * to give this putative "plays the music in your head" app a terrible name

pierrec 11y ago

I've also dreamed about such a thing, which would open new worlds for performance and composition. I think the technology isn't even remotely close to allowing this, though. The closest I can think of is research that has been done where MRI imaging and analysis were used to reconstruct images being watched by a subject. Results were very rough, though: http://news.berkeley.edu/2011/09/22/brain-movies/ http://news.berkeley.edu/2011/09/22/brain-movies/ And you have to consider that nonexistent music playing in your head has a special "unfinished" quality that might make it impossible to just translate into sound. My take is that when you process sound, it goes through multiple layers or depths of analysis, and imagined music takes place at an already deep level of analysis - could be very problematic for this project.