Brain Makes Music With 3D Printer?
Is it possible to create new musical instruments using 3D printers? How will reading human brainwaves change the way we produce music in the future?
John Stuart Executive Director of FIU Miami Beach Urban Studios explains to us the mind-blowing possibilities when you combine music and science.
Sebastien Perez
We're here at the Miami Beach Urban Studios, and we're here with John Stuart, and he's going to tell us a little bit about some of the incredible advanced work that he's doing over here.
John Stuart
Well, what we have behind us are some 3D printed musical instruments we have been making over the past couple of years with a faculty researcher. And these are exploring new directions in music because you happen to be located in a collider for people and ideas in art, design, technology, and the sciences. So we like to see things mash-up.
This is an architect working with a musician working with scientists to discover new ways of thinking about music, how instruments connect to the body, and then what new sounds you might get out of that. What new experiences you might get out of that? We're really exploring what it means to be human. In an ever more digitized age, we realize the world is becoming more digital and we have to become more human as that happens.
There have been several pieces written for the cello. And one of the most recent ones that we've played is one in which the cellist playing that musical instrument, but he also has a Muse headband, which has been hacked, he is playing a tympanum. He's playing another instrument. So he has to during this piece, which was written by Jacob Sudol, one of our composers in this crazy mix, he has to slow down the piece while people are watching him he's playing and he stops playing and he has to kind of meditate in front of 50 of his new best friends and bring the timing of the piece down, and then start playing again. So he actually has to play the piece requires that he control his brainwaves. And so this is all part of how we are trying to rethink how we deal with music and musical instruments.
As our musicians, the Amernet String Quartet, are Juilliard trained they're world-famous. We're always asking like, what comes first the musical instrument or the performer? When you learn an instrument, you obviously learn on that instrument, you learn how to play that instrument, you become really good at that thing. But what if somebody like Stradivarius comes along and makes a new violin? Well, hundreds of years ago, that was the new violin, then what do you do? Do you learn the new violin? Or do you learn? Or do you insist that you make one that you already know? We're always having these debates, how newness comes about. How do we think of innovation? Especially in this field, which is kind of new to this type of innovation.
Sebastien Perez
For those not familiar with the Muse headset is used for reading your brainwaves have been some really interesting inputs. There are also some other companies like neural who are integrated with virtual reality in order to control virtual objects using your brain. So we're really venturing into this new territory, there's a lag in between the ideas and creativity that we have and then the actual output and so I think maybe we're tapping into a closer more direct connection.
John Stuart
Right. We're switching the roles of Arts and Sciences. So we say the new Sciences are the arts because the new things that we really have to understand are the things that we feel, the things we smell, the things that we touch, the things we taste, the way we hear, and the things that make us who we are. We haven't studied those, as much as we've studied, say data for science. And so as soon as we get into this role where we can actually understand ourselves in this artistic and maybe more empathetic environment, we will have a better chance at solving some of the most urgent problems of today.