Disembodied and Collaborative Musical Interaction in the Multimodal Brain Orchestra

Most new digital musical interfaces have evolved upon the intuitive idea that there is a causality between sonic output and physical actions. Nevertheless, the advent of braincomputer interfaces (BCI) now allows us to directly access subjective mental states and express these in the physical world without bodily actions. In the context of an interactive and collaborative live performance, we propose to exploit novel brain-computer technologies to achieve unmediated brain control over music generation and expression. We introduce a general framework for the generation, synchronization and modulation of musical material from brain signal and describe its use in the realization of Xmotion, a multimodal performance for a “brain quartet”.