˗ˏˋ ChristineDinata ˎˊ˗

This blog post will summarize the proposal for my final project. Translating Memories. A brainwave art installation. This project is based on a lot of things, but mainly from making art that is personal, unique, one-of-a-kind to the person involved in making it, because the art is created by their own personal memory. It will also allow people to express their feelings with the correspondent memory without having to say it out loud. The projected image will consist of abstract visual created by the combination of lines, shapes, and colors that follows the Geneva Emotion wheel . The Geneva Emotion wheel has been commonly known by psychologists to determine what human emotions are represented by what color and plotted on a 2D valence-activation graph. This project doesn't really have any particular target audience. Anyone and everyone are welcomed. Art enthusiast or just the curious mind. The value that I believe when creating this project is it is still uncommon to us...

For those who are not familiar with all the applications that Muse provided and the third-party apps created to assist the Muse headband to its fullest use potential. There are actually 5 applications that are usually used by people to develop their work. These applications are different and serve various purposes according to the direction of the developers. The following excerpt is taken from the choosemuse forum (by Enigma644) Muse Lab is Interaxon’s (Muse's company name) Windows/Mac data visualization tool. It cannot connect to the Muse itself, rather, it listens for OSC data over the network. When initially opening the software, it’s blank and a bit confusing to add graphs. If you open this config file , it will set everything up for you and will start graphing as soon as it receives OSC data (over UDP port 5000). To send OSC data to Muse Lab, Interaxon provides two options: 1. MuseIO - This is a Windows/Mac program that connects to the older 2014 Muse and stream or r...

After three weeks of waiting, Mr. Maxime Michaud finally returns a lengthy reply. Maxime is very kind upon answering my questions. He even offered his Master's thesis to me - even though it is in French, it is a huge help to get it from him. Below are the questions and answers directly from our email interaction. 1. First of all, can you introduce yourself, where are you from, and what type of work do you do? Well, I guess my English bio sums it all. If you need more specific infos, let me know. Otherwise, I’m from Montreal (QC), Canada. I’m currently a freelancer, mostly doing audiovisual work, live visuals and sound. Here’s my bio bellow ( https://www.maximemichaud.com/bio-en ) : And a selective Resume ( https://www.maximemichaud.com/cv-en ) Transdisciplinary artist. ~ Audiovisual /composition /music /performance /video /biofeedback /installation /digital et al. Born in the early 90s. Aquarius, Libra ascendant. Described as kind and creative. Was part of the de...

So, recently I've tried to connect my Muse 2016 headband to MuseLab / MuseIO. The reason why I did it is to try out the Ristiaallokko experiment. So far, I haven't successfully built it. There are many factors to it. Being unfamiliar with C+ codes is one of them. I really don't know where to start and what to do to fix it. The second thing would be no familiar with Xcode. I don't know where are the options to fix the things they app warned. There is a lot of Googling needed to be done to even understand the errors the app mentioned.  One of the first things you would notice when using a newer version of Xcode or building a new system with an older version legacy map is that the Always Search User Paths (ALWAYS_SEARCH_USER_PATHS) setting is set to YES, but is not supported by the new build system. Make sure to change the ALWAYS_SEARCH_USER_PATHS to NO and migrate to using modern header include syntax (for more info click  here ). Changing it to NO helps ...

Earlier this week I mentioned an interactive art I found that uses the Muse headband as their EEG reader. It is called Ristiaallokko. The creator (or someone related in working on the project) shared the codes to Github . They also clearly state that they are using a 2014 Muse headband. They said that they: build it on top of MuseIO to access data and Muse command-line tools to send data via OSC to OpenFrameWorks and they are building the project on Mac. However, if you check the official  MuseIO website , you will notice that Muse said that they are currently not supporting the MuseSDK. Basically, we cannot download the MuseIO or access the Muse command-line officially from Muse. (Which is the most important application to get this project running) Then I scoured the internet and found someone posted the MuseLab content to be downloadable ( here ). Note that the version provided is only compatible with macOS Mojave (version 10.14.5) and under, cause I tried downloading ...

Upon researching further on how to use Muse headband's brainwave in real-time, I stumbled upon two mobile applications that can support this. One is called Muse Direct, created by the company Muse themselves, the other one is called Muse Monitor, which is a third-party app created by fellow Muse enthusiast, James Clutterbuck. He created this app to help users to record their brainwave activity in real-time and saving those files in .csv (excel form). These .csv files will then be uploaded to the Muse Monitor website  and they can produce colorful graphs that will allow users to read them. These graphs consist of 5 important waves such as Delta, Theta, Alpha, Beta, and Gamma. As you can see here, the app is reading the user's brain activity in real-time. It will change according to how the person is thinking, feeling, doing. There are a lot of factors contributing to the reading as well, such as how the headband is worn on the head, any rough or forced blinking of th...

Searching for more pieces of information and references for my Research and Development subject is hard because making brainwave art into reality needs a lot of expertise in brainwave reading and EEG use knowledge, and to have an at least basic information of how to code the create the right algorithms, etc. What makes it another struggle is that I honestly don't really know where and what to search for. So far, I'm still waiting for the email reply from Mr. Michaud about the inquiries I asked last week. I've also been searching for project examples people uploaded online that are similar to what I am doing. I've found this project  uploaded by laurames on Github. The project is called Ristiaallokko | Cross Waves Cross Waves is a sea state that occurs when two or more nonparallel wave systems meet. The waves generated by this phenomenon are dangerous to swimmers, boats, and ships caught between the crossing waves. Cross Waves is also the name of the Sprin...

Last September, I reached out to one of the artists mentioned by Dr. Sara Diamond, during her visit to Singapore for the ArtxTech Canada @SG event.  His name is Maxime Michaud and he is from Canada. When I found his website online, I decided to contact him if there would be any chance that I could ask him a view questions about his work. A few days had passed before I finally got his reply. Surprisingly he was eager to help me out. Even offered to come to Singapore if there is the opportunity. We then emailed back and forth for a bit to discuss the best option for him to share his work. However, I pitched the idea to my lecturer and I still haven't got any response. Nevertheless, I still asked him a view questions to help me clarify my curiosity. Attached below is the email I sent to Maxime, including the questions I'm curious about. Within days, he replied to me that he will try to answer my questions within the next two weeks. He also offered to shar...

I ordered the Muse2 headband a week ago from Ireland and it has arrived in Singapore. So this is how it looks like. Since Muse is marketed as a tool to help people focus on meditating, I tried Muse for meditating as well. I don't really have any experience of meditating before this because my definition of meditating is sitting cross-legged, closing your eyes, straightened your back and breathe calmly. I didn't know there are more scientific or psychological things that needed to be added to it. With this headband, the first thing it will do when you turn it on and use it is to calibrate your brain activities in its default state. You are told to sit in a comfortable position and think of anything or nothing. Just try to make your mind as its default state as possible. Once the app calibrated your brain, it will allow you to start meditating. There are several themes you can choose from the app to accompany you meditate, but let's pick one...

Upon researching more on examples of brainwave arts, I came across a Mashable article by Gianluca Mezzofiore (June 24, 2017) Random Quark is a London based company, who believes in bridging technology and art and making people happy by experiencing them with immersive interactive arts. Random Quark enjoys transporting people to a place of fun and colour; somewhere they can forget about their troubles for a while. One of the amazing works Random Quark did is called The Art of Feeling . Random Quark was approached by Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness Agency to create a machine that produces digital paintings by translating human brainwaves. Random Quark wanted to make the digital paintings come alive and astound as many as possible. That’s when we turned to the science of flocking birds to create a unique and complex painting. The machine measures the asymmetry between left/right hemispheres as well as the overall activation of the brain (alpha/beta/gamma waves) and p...