With a movie being written by AI doing the rounds, it comes as a no surprise that music could be written and performed by robots as well. A Chicago based audio start-up ‘Brain.fm’ is the new entrant in the AI space that promises to take your brain to a new medication state. From decreasing anxiety to relieving insomnia, from deep sleep to focused work and improving mental performance- the AI driven music promises all.    

The idea of altering your mind with music composed by AI was put up on a front row by Adam Hewett and Junaid Kalmadi who have utilized the unconventional theory that brain waves are altered in response to acoustic stimulation. Meaning that certain sounds are related to certain specific responses from the brain i.e music has the ability to alter or induce certain neural oscillations. Revolving around the same idea, the initial study was to find out how humans get accustomed to rhythms and once that was achieved, the next step was to build an artificial intelligence that was capable of making layered electronic music at a constant beat that yields desirable mental states.

So, how does it exactly work?

Targeting brain’s natural tendency to fall for rhythms is what Brain.fm is doing. Different rhythms are known to elicit different brain wave responses that could be measured using EEG. To exemplify a few-alpha waves correspond to relaxation, beta & gamma to focus. This implies that if music is capable of generating specific brain waves then desired state of brain could be attained in no time. The whole idea is based on something called as brain entertainment or neural entertainment.

With neuroscientists working in sync with the team to scientifically verify the types of responses and hence the type of music, it involved a lot of big names becoming a part of it. For example, the team utilized the work of Dr. Benjamin Morillon, who researches dynamic attending theory which was the key to understanding how oscillations in music could affect oscillations in the brain. Another study was with Dr. Giovanni Santostasi, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, which focused on how the auditory stimulation can impact sleep and focus.

There were other names like Dr. Sylevie Nozaradan, a neuroscience postdoc at the Université Catholique de Louvain, in Belgium, whose recent investigation was involved with demonstrating humans’ tendency to entertain mind and body to incoming rhythmic sensory inputs in real time. Though there was no mentioning of her research being utilized in reality, it indicated that a ability to sync with the music might vary from person to person.

And then came AI..

When we talk about music, it’s the exciting playlist that gets us going. Our mind may not accept monotony in the music and this is where artificial intelligence comes into picture- to have a long list of songs lined up that one could listen to for hours without experiencing boredom and dullness. It would also enable the songs to effectively incorporate various auditory components that generate a specific response in the brain.

The researchers of the study claimed that on an average a single 30-minute session would take up to a day to a week to be completed when done by a team of humans. If the math is done, a whole lot of good amount of sessions might take more than years to put them all together. Hence AI does the task of creating a massive amount of content that is fresh in terms of diversity and genre of music. This combination of AI and music could be viewed as AI posing as the brain of a neuroscientist and heart of a musician.

Available in seven free sessions before having to pay, it allows the user to enter the site and play the music in whichever state they like. The idea of AI driven music is in a fairly nascent stage now, in fact Brain.fm is one of its kind into the this space recently. We hope time to witness more AI generated ideas that gets us more focused, relaxed and help us reap other benefits too.