Music and neuroscience succeed in neuro Barcelona Music Hack Day

At 2 pm of Thursday 13^th June began the first neuro-Music Hack Day (neuro-MHD) of the history. For 24 hours 100 hackers, neuroscientists and musicians competed to develop software, mobile apps, hardware or websites that relate music and neuroscience.

Neuroscience and physiological technology already developed and present in the market were available for participants from around the world to relate music, brain signals, brain-computer interfaces and other physiological signals with the aim to present to the jury the result of their work .

Jury members, representatives from KiiCS Local Consortium entities and two IPSI school students that are going to take part of KiiCS Youth Advisory Board applied criterias of originality, innovation and entrepreneurship to choose the three winners of neuro-MHD.

The first prize went to Synchopathy, a work developed by Assaf Talmudi, Jonathan Rubin and Tamar Regev, in which small robots played two Israelis drums following neurological and physiological signals.

Blow up the video game, developed by Johannes Wagner, Tobias Baur and Florian Lingenfelser, received the second prize. The aim of this 80s aesthetic video game was that the protagonist overcomes a screen avoiding obstacles by running and jumping. The developers were able to control the character jump through the respiratory flow and the speed of the race by heart rate of the player.

Finally, the third prize was to p300 Harmonies, an application developed by Zacharias Vamvakousis in which the user could use the brain signals to modify the pitch and the harmony of a particular music.

This year Barcelona hosted the fourth edition of Music Hack Day, this time in Sonar+ D, the technological area of Sonar music festival. Among 50 proposals, more than a dozen of them in the focus of neuroscience, consolidated the success of the call and the development of this activity.

This initiative is lead by the Music Technology Group (MTG) in collaboration with the Science Communication Observatory (OCC-UPF) through the KiiCS project, and it is supported by the research group Synthetic, Perceptive, Emotive and Cognitive Systems (SPECS), also from UPF, and by Starlab Barcelona SL.


Este blog cuenta con la colaboración de la Fundación Española para la Ciencia y la Tecnología – Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación