The participants of the development residence given to two of the winning hacks at the neuro+Music Hack Day 2013 presented their results at the Sónar+D space inside of the famous electronic music festival in Barcelona. This grant for their technological and business growth has been organized by the Music Technology Group from Universitat Pompeu Fabra (MTG-UPF) and with the collaboration of Barcelona Activa and the company Starlab for business and technical assistance, respectively. The residence has been granted by the Science Communication Observatory (OCC-UPF) as part of the incubator activities of the European project KiiCS.
The two hacks presented have been “BrainLoops” (before “p300 harmonies”) by Zacharias Vamvakousis, and “Play your Mood“, by Marcel Farres. With “BrainLoops”, the user can do selections within a group of 6 sounds only via the activity of the brain. This hack can be especially helpful for people with locked in syndrome, ie, they cannot move the body but the brain is still active. On the other hand, “Play Your Mood” is a hack that, using Enobio to detect the brain activity, can decide which music style suits better one’s mood, or even try to improve it as music therapy.
Both projects have been present over the three days of the festival at the space of the Music Technology Group within the Marketlab of Sónar+D to show the results of their progress. Zacharias Vamvakousis thinks that the development grant has helped him discover the business potential of his idea: “We are engineers; we have no experience in the process of launching a product to the market. Thanks to this residence, we have talked to people who made us think about what it takes to bring an idea to the market. And technologically, it has also been positive because I had access to better and more accurate equipment to conduct my experiments”.
The KiiCS project (Knowledge Incubation in Innovation and Creation for Science) is a European initiative that aims to connect art, science and technology to boost innovative ideas. It started at the beginning of 2012 and is going to last 3 years, until January 2015.
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Este blog cuenta con la colaboración de la Fundación Española para la Ciencia y la Tecnología – Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación