Scientists are developing a brain-computer interface (BCI) that recognises a person’s affective state and plays music to them based on their mood.

Scientists from the universities of Reading and Plymouth believe the system could be used as a therapeutic aid for people suffering with certain forms of depression. The project would use an electroencephalograph (EEG) to transfer the electrical signal from the patient’s scalp via a series of wires to an amplifier box, which, in turn, would be connected to a computer. The computer would then generate its own synthetic music based on the user’s mental state.

The researches have developed a number of rule-based approaches to generate music with computers. They will use computer software to try to identify rules governing musical patterns that produce certain emotions. Then we would embed these rules into the system to generate the music.

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