Brain-Computer Music Interface

It is hard to imagine what will be possible with direct mind control in the next dozen years. Will we be driving cars with no steering wheel?
Read the research paper (warning it is a PDF).

“Researchers at the University of Plymouth created this “Brain-Computer Music Interface”, which uses two laptops to analyze brain waves and composes music based on the results.

The BCMI-Piano (Figure 1) falls into the category of BCI computer-oriented systems. These systems rely on the capacity of the users to learn to control specific aspects of their EEG, affording them the ability to exert some control over events in their environments.
Examples have been shown where subjects learn how to steer their EEG to select letters for writing words on the computer screen [5]. However, the motivation for the BCMI-Piano departed from a slightly different angle from other BCI systems. We aimed for a system that
would make music by guessing the meaning of the EEG of the subject rather than a system for explicit control of music by the subject. Learning to steer the system by means of biofeedback would be possible, but we did not investigate this possibility systematically yet. We acknowledge that the notion of “guessing the meaning of the EEG” here is simplistic, but it is nevertheless
plausible: it is based on the assumption that physiological information can be associated with specific mental activities [2].”

Via: TechEBlog