Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts

Sunday, April 20, 2014

Is it possible to invent a new musical instrument in just 24 hours? - article, pics

Hacking the instrument of the future in Boston

By LJ RichReporter, BBC Click

LJ Rich visits Music Tech Fest's hackathon

Stick a bunch of people in a room with pizza, caffeine and a whole load of kit, wait 24 hours and something interesting emerges.

That's the theory of a hackathon.

To find out how they work, I enter one held during Music Tech Fest, which is on tour in Boston.

The event is dedicated to music technology, my favourite topic.

On Saturday, I arrive at Microsoft's New England Research and Development Center (yes, the Nerd Center) and at half past one, it's time to start - hackathon organiser Adam John Williams energetically shouts "go".

You wouldn't know it, though - people are just sitting and chatting. Where's the intensity? Where's the urgency?

It feels like someone's bought a whole load of ingredients for a cake, but no recipes.

Dragon staff

Some people have, however, come here with ideas in mind. For example, Sean Manton, a gifted musician, biomedical researcher, coder and fire dancer.

He would like to use his dragon staff - a pole that he spins - to control music playback-speed during a performance. Physical designer Elio Icaza Milson has agreed to help Sean 3D-print a holder for a micro-sensor.

The sensor should detect rotation speed and send data wirelessly to a computer - assuming it can be attached to the staff.

It's all quite fun. But I don't have any ideas yet, so I help MJ, a pan-piping beatboxer, record a track.

Among the hackathon attendees was MJ - a pan-piping beatboxer

Ten hours in, we move to a TV studio up the road for the overnight segment.

RedStar Union is a cool venue with a stage, musicians and a room full of kit to stream music content live on the web.

Tonight it's rammed with Oculus Rift virtual reality headsets and computers in the front room, and hackers and kit wherever we can fit.

It's a pretty intensive experience, and not without some mischief. After being cooped up in a small room for most of the evening, we decide to storm the stage for some very loud creative idea exchanges.

One of my stage cohorts is CJ Carr, another musician and hacker specialising in machine-generated music and music therapy.

He's making what he's calling a Hexadecipus - a 16-legged music controller made from a playable painting.

It's about 3am, so I compose some music for the Hexadecipus. It's in 17/4 time signature... because it has 16 legs and a head.

At 4am I ask Music Tech Fest founder Michela Magas why people take part in hackathons. She says it is an opportunity to "collide with another wonderful mind who has been researching something different from you - you two might find synergies and something magical might happen".

A little crazy

It's fun collaborating amid the chaos.

We are hacking, playing, colouring and occasionally breakdancing through the night.

There are also horrible potato crisps that I keep eating to make sure they're horrible.

Sean's flatmate has brought his piano in amid the music and wires and crisps and caffeine - and there's not a single spare plug socket in sight.

Around 50 hackers entered the competition to win one of three top prizes

I'm having a great time.

I wonder whether staying up all night lowers barriers to creativity, or just makes us go a little crazy.

At around 8.30am (19 hours in) inspiration strikes over breakfast when I say a doughnut tastes of D major. For the first time in my life, people hear that and think: data set. So, they ask a few more questions and we eat a few more doughnuts.

I don't normally talk about my synaesthesia, but one of the connections is that is I hear music when I eat things.

Synaesthesia is where the senses are mixed together - for example seeing colour when listening to music - or tasting food and hearing chords.

Developers Alex Dorsk and Danny Kirschner are fascinated by this, and together we have the idea to make an app that pairs music with food.

Alex uses Balsamiq, a sketching program to help us imagine the app layout and what we'd like it to do. Dan works on the actual mechanics of the app on a program called Ruby on Rails.

Meanwhile I am working out which data the user needs to enter and what the app needs to return - basically how the app and the user will ultimately interact.

Music snippets

It feels fantastic to hack through the night - though that could be the sleep deprivation. We finish the first draft just in time, so it's back to the Nerd Center to present our idea, which we've called SoundBites.

Thirty hours in and full of coffee, we present our app along with doughnuts for the audience to eat at the same time as us.

LJ Rich and Adam John Williams took to the stage for some creative brainstorming

Our sugar bribe helps the presentation go down well. Sean's dragon staff also works - the faster he spins it, the faster the music plays. And CJ's Hexadecipus controller is also a triumph, playing musical snippets determined by the colour pressed.

They each win the prize in their category, and to top it all, our team wins the prize in the synaesthesia category!

Alex, Dan and I are continuing to work on the app together on collaborative coding site GitHub - which I guess means I'm now a fully-fledged music hacker.

After a few final hours going out dancing to celebrate our respective wins, I finally fall to sleep after a mere 40 hours on the go. Not bad for my first (and definitely not last!) hackathon.

Sunday, January 12, 2014

Technology - our greatest myth - can it really transform society?

Many optimists believe that technology can transform society, whether it’s the internet or the latest phone. But as Tom Chatfield argues in his final column for BBC Future, the truth about our relationship with technology is far more interesting.

Lecturing in late 1968, the American sociologist Harvey Sacks addressed one of the central failures of technocratic dreams. We have always hoped, Sacks argued, that “if only we introduced some fantastic new communication machine the world will be transformed.” Instead, though, even our best and brightest devices must be accommodated within existing practices and assumptions in a “world that has whatever organisation it already has.”

As an example, Sacks considered the telephone. Introduced into American homes during the last quarter of the 19th Century, instantaneous conversation across hundreds or even thousands of miles seemed close to a miracle. For Scientific American, editorializing in 1880, this heralded “nothing less than a new organization of society – a state of things in which every individual, however secluded, will have at call every other individual in the community, to the saving of no end of social and business complications…”

Yet the story that unfolded was not so much “a new organization of society” as the pouring of existing human behaviour into fresh moulds: our goodness, hope and charity; our greed, pride and lust. New technology didn’t bring an overnight revolution. Instead, there was strenuous effort to fit novelty into existing norms.

The most ferocious early debates around the telephone, for example, concerned not social revolution, but decency and deception. What did access to unseen interlocutors imply for the sanctity of the home – or for gullible or corruptible members of the household, such as women or servants? Was it disgraceful to chat while improperly dressed? Such were the daily concerns of 19th-century telephonics, matched by phone companies’ attempts to assure subscribers of their propriety.

As Sacks also put it, each new object is above all “the occasion for seeing again what we can see anywhere” – and perhaps the best aim for any writing about technology is to treat novelty as not as an end, but as an opportunity to re-scrutinize ourselves.

I’ve been writing this fortnightly column since the start of 2012, and in the last two years have watched new devices and services become part of similar negotiations. By any measure, ours is an age preoccupied with novelty. Too often, though, it offers a road not to insight, but to a startling blindness about our own norms and assumptions.

Take the litany of numbers within which every commentary on modern tech is couched. Come the end of 2014, there will be more mobile phones in the world than people. We have moved from the launch of modern tablet computing in mid-2011 to tablets likely accounting for over half the global market in personal computers in 2014. Ninety per cent of the world’s data was created in the last two years. Today’s phones are more powerful than yesterday’s supercomputers. Today’s software is better than us at everything from chess to quiz shows. And so on.

Singularity myth

It’s a story in which both machines and their capabilities increase for ever, dragging us along for the exponential ride. Perhaps the defining geek myth of our age, The Singularity, anticipates a future in which machines cross an event horizon beyond which their intellects exceed our own. And while most people remain untouched by such faith, the apocalyptic eagerness it embodies is all too familiar. Surely it’s only a matter of time – the theory goes – before we finally escape, augment or otherwise overcome our natures and emerge into some new phase of the human story.

Or not. Because – while technological and scientific progress is indeed an astonishing thing – its relationship with human progress is more aspiration than established fact. Whether we like it or not, acceleration cannot continue indefinitely. We may long to escape flesh and history, but the selves we are busy reinventing come equipped with the same old gamut of beauties, perversities and all-too-human failings. In time, our dreams of technology departing mere actuality – and taking us along for the ride – will come to seem as quaint as Victorian gentlemen donning evening dress to make a phonecall.

This is one reason why, over the last two years, I’ve devoted a fair share of columns to the friction between the stories we tell about tech and its actual unfolding in our lives. From the surreptitious erosion of digital history to the dumbness of “smart” tech, via email’s dirty secrets and theimportance of forgetfulness, I love exploring the tensions between digital tools and analogue selves – not because technology is to be dismissed or deplored, but because it remains as mired in history, politics and human frailty as everything else we touch.

This will be the last regular Life:Connected column I write for BBC Future. Instead, I’ll be writing a book about one of my obsessions: attention, and how its quantification and sale have become a battleground for 21st Century selves. I will, however, continue examining technology’s impact here and elsewhere – and asking what it means to watch ancient preoccupations poured into fresh, astounding moulds.

On which note: what do you think is most ripe for abandonment around technology today? Which habit will come to be seen by future generations as quaint – our equivalent of putting on bow ties for telephones?

Friday, April 5, 2013

Telepathy - Reading Minds - will we ever create the technology to read minds?

There’s tantalising evidence that technology could one day allow us to transmit thoughts telepathically between two brains. The question is how far can we go?

In a lab at Harvard Medical School, a man is using his mind to wag a rat’s tail. To send his command, he merely glances at a strobe light flickering on a computer screen, and a set of electrodes stuck to his scalp detects the activity triggered in his brain. A computer processes and relays the electrodes’ signal to an ultrasound machine poised over the rat’s head. The machine delivers a train of low-energy ultrasound pulses into the rat’s brain, stimulating its motor cortex – the area that governs its movements. The pulses are aimed purposely at a rice-grain-sized area that controls the rat’s tail. It starts to wag.

This link-up is the brainchild of Seung-Schik Yoo, and it works more than 94% of the time. Whenever a human looks at the flickering lights, the rat’s tail almost always starts to wag just over a second later. The connection between them is undeniably simple. The volunteer is basically flicking a switch in the rat’s brain between two positions – move tail, and don’t move tail. But it is still an impressive early example of something we will see more of in coming years – a way to connect between two living brains.

Science-fiction is full of similar (if more flamboyant) brain-to-brain links. From the Jedi knights of Star Wars to various characters in the X-Men comics, popular culture abounds with telepathic characters that can read minds and transmit their thoughts without any direct physical contact or the use of their senses. There’s no evidence that any of us mere mortals share the same ability, but as Yoo’s study shows, technology is edging us closer in that direction. The question is: how far can we recreate telepathy using electronics? A human wagging a rat’s tail is one thing. Will we ever get to the point where we can share speech or emotions or memories?

The first step would be to decode what someone is thinking. Neuroscientists have made substantial progress in deciphering images from patterns of brain activity, and several groups are working on decoding inner speech. People have managed to commandeer computer cursors, artificial limbs and virtual drones through brain-computer interfaces (BCI), which use brain activity to control man-made devices. But to achieve true telepathy, brain activity has to be decoded and used to influence another brain. “We’ve got brain-to-computer interfaces, but we need the other side of it – computer-to-brain interfaces,” says Yoo.

Last year, Christopher James from the University of Warwick built a very rudimentary one. He used scalp electrodes to mentally control a set of LEDs, which flashed at one speed when James thought about moving his left hand, and at another when he imagined moving his right hand. James’ daughter was watching the LEDs, and though she couldn’t consciously distinguish between the two flashing speeds, her visual cortex – the part of the brain that processes sights – registered the difference. By measuring the activity in her brain, another set of electrodes could work out what the LEDs were doing.

This may have been an electronic link-up between two human brains, but as James points out, it’s not telepathy. “It’s not like someone sits there imagining a complex thought, and it appears in the other person’s head,” he says. “My daughter was completely unaware. At no point did she say ‘Left’ or ‘Right’. It would have been more informative to put the words on the screen.” She also had to look at the LEDs to register what was happening, which violates the “no senses allowed” rule of true telepathy.

Brain dictionary

Yoo’s study, linking a human to a rat, was closer. Miguel Nicolelis from Duke University provided another striking example earlier this year, by connecting the brains of two rats that were faced with the same task –press one of two levers to get a rewarding drink. When the first rat made its choice, electrical activity in its motor cortex was recorded and converted into a simpler signal – either one electrical pulse or a train of them, depending on which lever it pressed. The signals were beamed to another implant in the motor cortex of the second rat, which had its own levers. If it picked the same one as its anonymous partner – which it did 64% of the time – both rats got an extra drink. By the way, one rat was in the US city of Durham, North Carolina, while the other was in Natal, Brazil.

These examples are impressive, but all of them involved the transmission of very simple information – nothing more complex than a binary choice. Left or right. One or zero. The telepathy of science-fiction is still looking pretty fictional.

What would it take to send a more complex message? A sensation? A memory? We know it’s certainly possible to evoke vivid sensations by stimulating different parts of the brain. Target the retina or the visual centres and you can produce illusory flashes of light called phosphenes. And in the 1950s, neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield famously elicited vivid colours, sounds and memories by stimulating different parts of a surgical patient’s brain.

But to do this in an accurate, targeted way is far more difficult. Just consider sharing something simple like the feel of a door. “You feel a lot of different sensations like temperature and texture, and multiple areas of the brain are being engaged to interpret what’s going on. You have to decode all of that,” says Yoo.

Now, think about opening the door. “You have to make the decision to open the door, know what a door is and looks like, identify a handle, know that the handle goes down, and instruct your arm to move,” says James. At the moment, our brain-computer interfaces can only cope with the last bit. Scientists have indeed used electrical implants to connect the motor cortex with muscles in an arm, allowing patients to move otherwise paralysed limbs. But the rest of the steps recruit many more parts of the brain involved in memory, language, decision-making, and more.

To make matters worse, all of this will vary from individual to individual. The neurons in my brain that encode the concept of a door may reside in the same general area as their counterparts in your brain, but not in exactly the same spot. To effectively decode complex content from one brain and encode it in another, you’d need to compile a thorough “dictionary” for each brain, linking neural activity across the whole grey blob with different concepts or sensations. “We have to individually customise it all,” says Yoo.

There are technological challenges too. Researchers like James and Yoo have relied on electroencephalography (EEG) – a technique that uses electrodes positioned on the scalp to measure underlying brain activity. On the plus side, it’s simple to use and doesn’t use surgery. Unfortunately, James compares it to “recording 150 conversations in a packed ballroom while you’re sitting outside with 50 microphones.”

Drill deeper

Stimulating the brain from the outside is equally crude. Scientists are limited to techniques like transcranial magnetic stimulation, which use magnetic fields to zap large areas of the brain into excitement or submission. And Yoo’s technique – focused ultrasound – is newer, but still involves immobilising a rat’s head under a large machine. Neither technique is well suited for delivering precise sensations.

The best alternative is to actually drill through the skull and implant electrodes. These have improved to the point where we can record activity from a small, tight cluster of neurons and stimulate them with fast and careful timing. But you would have to plaster the whole brain with them. And did I mention the drilling? “Is it something that humans without severe medical problems should put up with?” asks Michael D’Zmura, a psychologist from University of California, Irvine. “I think not.”

All of which raises the critical question: why would you bother? “You have to compare these options to what we’re capable of when we speak to one another,” says D’Zmura. We already have incredibly sophisticated biological hardware for making and interpreting sounds, which don’t rely on any implants or surgeries.

That said, everyone mentions the possibility of communicating with locked-in patients, who are fully awake and aware but unable to move or talk. But it is hard to see what benefit a truly telepathic connection would provide beyond what simpler brain-computer interfaces could achieve. These machines have already allowed locked-in patients to controlartificial limbs or send messages to their loved ones, and since these people are awake, getting messages to them is not the issue.

So the ideal of communicating complex information may be a red herring. James finds it easier to envisage situations where conveying simple sensations is more useful. “If you have a busy air-traffic controller whose senses are all over the place, you could imagine bypassing them all and delivering a type of alert when two aircraft are coming close to one another,” he says. It does not have to be a clear message. It could be something as simple as a tingling feeling – less Professor X’s psychic rallying cries, and more Spider-Man’s spider-sense.