Categories
Art Music Technology

The mind can’t be confined

As goes for so many of you, our lives have been upended by the pandemic. We had our most anticipated events cancelled, including the recording of our first album in Copenhagen, a workshop at the Loop festival in Berlin, and performing with Cogito in Space at a CERN exhibit in Brussels. Now, 1+1=3 is scattered, each confined to his own room, so close yet so far away. But this is the time to develop our ideas, and to prepare them for the light, which will inevitable come again. It’s time to search inside for that which inspires, brings us hope or just gives us something new and exciting to play with.

These are trying times, and anxiety and lack of stimulation makes it even harder to stay focused and be in good spirits. But on TV, podcasts and amateur media, we are seeing more and more people sharing something more private; the projects that they never had time for before. Or just something to keep the boredom at bay. Whatever it is, I like this lack of glam and glitter, of stage and podium, of high-definition and mastering, production managers and principle investigators. It’s been a while since we shared something about our project (which definitely is home-made), so let me give you a short update, and share some videos to aborted exercises and preparations.

Robert has been very busy on the next stage of the EEGsynth, with great success. Perhaps most importantly, the EEGsynth is now packaged as an executable via pip! You can find the instructions for installation in our docs. This means:

  1. Much less hassle with dependencies when installing.
  2. Easy to update to new stable releases.
  3. The EEGsynth can now be run as an executable, greatly simplifying its use.
  4. The code, not only the design, is now modular, and more robust.
  5. The output of the terminal is standardized and tractable.
  6. And many more advantages and improvement, to many to mention!

The documentation will have to catch up quite a bit, still, but from a developer point of view is great progress. From the artist’s point of view, this makes it much easier to get started, and to share and run EEGsynth patches. As I mentioned in the previous post, we now have several EEGsynth labs running, and these improvements made that possible.

Fabien Guillermont has finished his documentary about our our work, our Transformation event in Stockholm last year, and brainwave music in general. It is a work of art in it’s own right, however in which he shows the arts and sciences intersecting, opening up the mystery, and a space of personal and artistic development. We can’t wait to share it with you. Soon!

I was planning on starting an EEGsynth project next month, focused on elementary  EEGsynth and modular patches. For this reason, I’ve been setting up a way of recording audio (using my Zoom H6n as an audio card), and video, and learning more about sound mixing and mastering. It’s not much of a studio, but I do feel everything is there to finally have some artistic output as well. I’m trying to put out a short video every day or so, either just modular, or trying our EEGsynth patches. Let me start with the latter; a first try using a new way of working on the EEGsynth, using an electromyography (EMG) patch that we were preparing for Loop.

 

And then here are more jams. I will try to keep this playlist growing in the next couple of weeks. Perhaps this confinement is good for something, if not to teach you to be happy with what you’ve got. Stay safe!

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *