Project H: Play
Alpha tug-of-war for two, live EEG sonification, a brain-controlled lighting rig. Underrated for learning, and the best recruiting demos a NeurotechX club can have.
You are skimming: the title, the first figure, and the short version. Switch to Read in the header for the full page, or Deep to open every deep dive.
Not everything has to be a paper. A two-player game where whoever relaxes harder wins, a visualizer that turns band power into colour, an instrument you play with your eyes closed: each one takes a weekend, teaches real-time signal processing under a deadline (the demo is at seven), and draws a crowd. The crowd is where clubs, collaborators, and occasionally employers come from.
Alpha tug-of-war
Two people, one channel each at O1, a rope on the screen. Every quarter second compute each player’s alpha power relative to their own two-minute baseline and move the rope toward the calmer player. Whoever relaxes harder wins. It is funny, it is instantly understood, and it quietly teaches normalization (why relative to baseline), latency (why the rope lags), and the fact that trying hard to relax does the opposite.
Sonification
Map delta, theta, alpha, and beta power to four notes’ loudness in a Web Audio or SuperCollider patch, or send them as MIDI to any synthesizer. Then map spectral shape to timbre. Then let an ERP trigger a drum. The listener’s ear picks out structure in the EEG that the eye misses, and you learn that band power alone is a thin description of a signal.
Visuals and light
Band powers to the parameters of a generative shader, or to a strip of addressable LEDs, or to the brightness of the room. Slow and smooth reads as calm; fast and bright reads as busy. Perform it at a club meeting with the room’s lights driven by whoever is wearing the band.
A brain-controlled instrument
SSVEP, with the flickering targets mapped to notes or chords, so a musician plays with their gaze. Or motor imagery to switch patches, if you have trained enough. The SSVEP version works at the first rehearsal.
What to be careful about
All the usual: batteries, photosensitivity screening if anything flickers, consent from whoever puts the electrodes on. And a little honesty in the presentation. The rope is moving because of alpha power, which is a measure of visual cortex idling, not of “calm” in any deep sense. Say that. The demo is more interesting when it is true.
- Build tug-of-war in an evening with two of your amplifier’s channels and a Python game loop.
- Add per-player baseline normalization. Notice how much fairer it gets.
- Show it at a club meeting. Note what people ask. Their questions are your next explainers.
- Pick one of the other three and build it for the next meeting.