Netflix Designed A Symphony From Random Brainwaves

Netflix’s new sci-fi show by way of Babylon 5 alum J. Michael Straczynski, feel eight, is all about eight characters around the globe who can keep in touch with every other telepathically. Suitably, which is also how Straczynski and company got here up with the exhibit’s synthy, trance-like theme tune: they took eight random topics, showed them some looping psychedelic photos, and recorded their brainwave patterns, extrapolating it all right into a single Brainwave Symphony.

“there is something musical about the way the brain works,” Straczynski observes. “it can be a symphony on its own terms.”

Working with technologist Patrick Gunderson, the feel 8 showrunners took eight random subjects, and uncovered them to trippy images that have been designed to provoke an emotional response. becoming them with headscarf sensors, Gunderson and his workforce then recorded their topics’ alpha, beta, delta, gamma, and theta waves.

but how have been these waves turned into song? here is how the respectable web page describes the method:

The Symphony itself used to be conceived like a jazz chart the place the structure of the general tune is outlined and followed, but the individual performances don’t seem to be identified unless they occur, they are improvised in the second. We equipped the rhythm part and the song drift, however the individual melody factors are taken from our participants’ brainwaves as a type of improvisational efficiency.

In other phrases, while nearly all of Brainwave Symphony was once namely composed, certain variables in the melody ended up being controlled by means of the brainwave patterns of the Symphony’s human subjects.

it is a bit bit of a cheat, but the finished composition still has a kind of guttural, id-like musical impact: it does really feel like the random throbbing of a psychic gestalt.