Let Your Mood Dictate the Music

Biometric feedback as an input device is an idea that’s been floating around for a while, but researchers at MIT’s Media Lab Europe have developed a musical “game” that allows your mood to influence the music, rather than the other way round.

When your mood changes, so does your skin resistance (just ask the CIA), and MIT’s project, called Peace Composed, uses a pair of biometric sensors to measure it. This is then used to compose a piece of music based on seven different layers of instruments, including bass, piano, strings and wind instruments.

The application has obvious stress management uses, provided you’re not to stressed or overworked to actually get round to using it, and makes a fitting companion piece to “Relax to Win”, a program developed to help children with anxiety and stress problems. We don’t know why, but the title really appeals to us.

BBC News

Published by

Fraser Lovatt

Fraser Lovatt has spent the last fifteen years working in publishing, TV and the Internet in various capacities, and believes that they will be seperate platforms for at least a while yet. His main interests at the moment are exploring where Linux is taking home entertainment and how technology is conferring technical skills on more and more people. Fraser Lovatt was born in the same year that 2001: A Space Odyssey was delighting and confusing people in the cinemas, and developed a lifelong love of technology as soon as he realised that things could be taken apart, sometimes put back together again, but mostly left in bits or made into something the original designer hadn't quite planned upon. At school he was definitely in the ZX Spectrum/Magpie/BMX camp, rather than the BBC Micro/Blue Peter/well-behaved group. This is all deeply ironic as he later went on to spend nine years working at the BBC. After a few years of working as a bookseller in Scotland, ("Back when it was actually a skilled profession" he'll tell anyone still listening), he moved to England for reasons he can't quite explain adequately to himself. After a couple of publishing jobs punctuated by sporadic bursts of travelling and photography came the aforementioned nine years at the BBC where he specialised in internet technologies and video. These days his primary interests are Java, Linux, videogames and pies - and if they're not candidates for convergence, then what is?