Music From the Brain

There is a new computer program which lets your brain turn a MRI machine into a musical instrument. The program assigns notes to an active region of the cortex.

A MRI can be used to track changes in brain activity by lighting up in different colors and intensities as the brain processes information. By assigning each area of the brain a note, and each level of intensity a volume allows the data derived from the brain to produce music. A computer analyzes the movements of the functional MRI's and creating musical pieces that correspond to the changes.

Schizophrenic Brains Meets Beethoven

During the work of philosopher Dan Lloyd, he discovered that scans of patients with dementia and schizophrenia make audibly different music than those of people with normal brains. People with dementia have more erratic rhythms and less bright notes, while people with schizophrenia have more complex patterns in the music created by their brains.