I’ve been exploring two bodies of work outside of class: digital interpretations of the novels of Virginia Woolf and interactive experiences/environments triggered by a user’s brainwaves using a hacked Muse headset.

For this assignment, I attempted to bring them together by creating a patch that live remixes the music video for Max Richter’s composition Mrs. Dalloway in the Garden through the mapping of theta brainwaves to the jit.matrixset’s frame buffer. Theta waves are indicative of mind-wandering, so the experience of remixing the video is meant to reflect the journey of Mrs. Dalloway herself who spends the majority of Woolf’s book with a mind that meanders back and forth between the past and the present.

The Muse headset sends data via a terminal script, which transforms the data into OSC messages which are read by Max. (The patch features a test subpatcher for testing without the Muse headset).

As mind-wandering and thus theta wave activity increases, the number of frames of delay increases, leading to a more aggressive movement across time. In addition, the waves are also inverse mapped to a jit.brcosa object, and so as the user becomes more present and concentrates more on the present environment, mind-wandering/theta wave activity decreases, triggering the video to fade closer and closer to black. The video only fully appears when the user’s mind is wandering freely.

Here’s a documentary video of a full cycle of the patch in action as influenced by me wearing the Muse.

And here’s the Gist.