This could be a half-baked question, research, or really an idea. Since it is uncertain, it is in the halfbaked basket. I am unaware of anywhere else to put it.

So the product is reading your brain waves and figuring out what song you are playing. Is that possible now? I sometimes when I play the music in my mind, it is as good as CD quality! At least it sounds like that. But if I try to sing it or something, I'd make the crows fly away. So, can a subject's brainwaves be measured as he is asked to replay some music in his mind, and from those a kind of pattern derived which would fit with the 7 notes? And then this device will recognize the pattern and convert the waves to electronic sound. Would be interesting and freaky, and hence in demand.
-- xkuntay, Feb 09 2009

This artist makes me think up popular music riffs the way Oasis borrowed from the Beatles http://www.youtube....watch?v=etHOFmFF3FA
genius concentrate its like any few 3 second samples could be recombined to be a new pop songI haven't yet heard [beanangel, Feb 13 2009]

Mind reading band http://www.cnn.com/...headband/index.html
That should do it. [xkuntay, Aug 18 2014, last modified Aug 19 2014]

Very interesting question. I wish I new more about how sound maps to the auditory cortex, but I don't.
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Feb 09 2009


I would kill to have this. I think the music in my mind is worth recording, too, but I can't get it out of my mind and onto a page in real time, and stopping to write usually kills it. I end up writing something very different from what I was "hearing".

Playing an instrument is not an adequate substitute, by the way. Maybe it would be if you were really, really good, but even then, you could still only play one instrument at a time. Mind music is not as limited as hand music.
-- colorclocks, Feb 10 2009


This comes down to the issue of mental images again. How easy is it to hear something in your head without interpretation? I am almost certain there's no direct representation. For instance, i often have no idea what key a piece of music is in, whether it's mono or stereo or what instruments it's being played on. I sometimes get the tempo wrong too. Whereas i may have a poor aural memory, i am sure that many other people would have similar deficiencies. Some people might have a better ear, but does that mean they'll have a representation to the result of actually hearing music in the auditory cortex?
-- nineteenthly, Feb 11 2009


You got me playing some of that stuff in my head to check out the quality. I know I can teach myself stuff by replaying songs that are stored. I also know that the songs I know I have heard more than just once or it is very repeditive. I recently accessed schoolhouse rock and crossreferenced it with number songs for a kid that is counting and multiplying.
-- MercuryNotMars, Feb 12 2009


//the 7 notes// Which 7 notes? I think it would be a pity to attempt to quantise the brain's music into some set of notes. The concept of a 'note' as commonly taught is almost meaningless anyway.
-- spidermother, Feb 12 2009


think of your mind as some kind of advanced, and very personalized mp3 compression - there is a lot of things going on in accoustic music, that does not translate to mind-music, and vice versa. It might be possible to detect which of a small set of pieces you are currently listening to, but to have others hear the song as you are hearing it would involve two steps of translation that are not even on the horizon yet.
-- loonquawl, Feb 12 2009


I read this as a slightly Dirk Gently-esque way of mapping brain waves (of all types, not just music related) into music. I think that that might work too. If you can do it with the flight of swallows, then why not with brain waves. I like the idea as I should have read it too!
-- MadnessInMyMethod, Feb 12 2009


I do think that memories and mental images are seriously compressed in some sense, but i also think that calling them to mind produces some kind of physical change in the appropriate part of the brain. I can't pin it down now, but i heard about an experiment where someone imagined a chequered black and white field and it led to a pattern similar to the response their brain made when they were presented with that actual visual stimulus. I just wish i could quote chapter and verse on that one.

For all i know, the auditory cortex could have momentary patterns like those generated by actually hearing the sounds recalled. Having said that, auditory perception isn't how it seems because for example a loud noise can mask the perception of a quieter noise occurring just before it and the perception of clicks played during comprehensible speech tend to be shifted to one side or the other of morphemes even if they're played in the middle of them. So, for example, the following word might be uttered (without the gaps):

"antidisestablishme <CLICK> ntarianism"

but i would "hear":

"antidisestablishment <CLICK> arianism".

That makes me wonder what happens in click languages and what happens if you don't know the language.

Whoops, broke the HB! Editing...
-- nineteenthly, Feb 12 2009


I like this idea tremendously

there is a phrase marked for engineering you could place at the description

thus

marked for engineering

engineering: I have this vague feeling that stimulus response pairs have been fMRI mapped thus if fMRI can't distinguish between two neutral faces it can distinguish between two faces each of which has a different strong trained attribute

music is much richer than the tonal range pythagoras created but you could try creating then training a stimulus response pair to each of the seven notes that way your brain would beep out to the fmri machine particular notes separated with time which is like sheet music

PS I got the mystery brain upgrade rather than the cd quality musical memory upgrade

I think up tunes though Ronald Jenkees at link has a pachebel improv that really gave me a bunch of hints of possible new pop songs
-- beanangel, Feb 12 2009


The best thing is, this device could be a first step towards 'mind reading'.

On the other hand, this device would be quite redundant, as real musicians don't really need this kind of thing, but they can put their music into notes, or directly into music as in the example of Ronald Jenkees, who is by the way one of the sickest talented people I've seen in long time.
-- xkuntay, Feb 15 2009


[xkuntay], your link is broken. Or it maybe it's just confused due to it's proximity to a [beanangel] link.
-- normzone, Aug 18 2014



random, halfbakery