I just made and informal EEG of my frontal activity. It’s not entirely surprising given my temperament, and my usual EEGs. I didn’t use a medical EEG machine, and the brainwaves I recorded on my digital scope are rather noisy (spikey, not those smooth lines from a real setup) — I didn’t filter them, but the underlying brain waves can be interpolated.
Primarily, though, I wanted to take the “pulse” or frequency of my brain — which was about 7Hz, riding on top of the longer ~1Hz delta waves (which are usually the highest in amplitude). The 7Hz activity suggests a predominance of Theta activity. All the other waves were there too (good thing), but the picture above shows 10 second of capture and the periodic ups and downs upon the Delta outline the Theta range. Theta is associated with a lot of things, among them, rest / meditative states, periods of high creativity. That’s good.
I studied with David Rosenboom as a grad student, who has a real EEG machine he used to connect to synthesizers. In fact he did an entire album. Once, he even hooked up John Lennon and Yoko Ono. It’s not a new idea to think of brain waves as a genesis for sound waves, either in art or biofeedback. The point, though, is that we’re all electromagnetically tuned, and why not use that bio energy and our own senses in electronic music?
With a little filtering the above waveform is an ideal low frequency oscillator, great for the modulation of sound. Next, maybe, I’ll filter to smooth out those waves, amplify them and make some sound waves. Therapeutic, spiritual and metaphysical sound is not just bells and singing bowls, it certainly has a place in the world of electronic instruments.
To me it’s all about resonance. Everything is resonant in its own way, including our brains. I’m resonating at 1Hz and 7Hz…