Brain-Computer Interfaces for Artistic Expression

Artists have been using BCIs for artistic expression since the 1960s. Their interest and creativity is now increasing because of the availability of affordable BCI devices and software that does not require them to invest extensive time in getting the BCI to work or tuning it to their application. Designers of artistic BCIs are often ahead of more traditional BCI researchers in ideas on using BCIs in multimodal and multiparty contexts, where multiple users are involved, and where robustness and efficiency are not the main matters of concern. The aim of this workshop is to look at current (research) activities in BCIs for artistic expression and to identify research areas that are of interest for both BCI and HCI researchers as well as artists/designers of BCI applications

Learn Piano with BACh: An Adaptive Learning Interface that Adjusts Task Difficulty based on Brain State

We present Brain Automated Chorales (BACh), an adaptive brain-computer system that dynamically increases the levels of difficulty in a musical learning task based on pianists\u27 cognitive workload measured by functional near-infrared spectroscopy. As users\u27 cognitive workload fell below a certain threshold, suggesting that they had mastered the material and could handle more cognitive information, BACh automatically increased the difficulty of the learning task. We found that learners played with significantly increased accuracy and speed in the brain-based adaptive task compared to our control condition. Participant feedback indicated that they felt they learned better with BACh and they liked the timings of the level changes. The underlying premise of BACh can be applied to learning situations where a task can be broken down into increasing levels of difficulty

A Human-Computer Duet System for Music Performance

Virtual musicians have become a remarkable phenomenon in the contemporary multimedia arts. However, most of the virtual musicians nowadays have not been endowed with abilities to create their own behaviors, or to perform music with human musicians. In this paper, we firstly create a virtual violinist, who can collaborate with a human pianist to perform chamber music automatically without any intervention. The system incorporates the techniques from various fields, including real-time music tracking, pose estimation, and body movement generation. In our system, the virtual musician's behavior is generated based on the given music audio alone, and such a system results in a low-cost, efficient and scalable way to produce human and virtual musicians' co-performance. The proposed system has been validated in public concerts. Objective quality assessment approaches and possible ways to systematically improve the system are also discussed

A Brains or Beauty: How to Engender Trust in User-Agent Interactions

Software-based agents are becoming increasingly ubiquitous and automated. However, current technology and algorithms are still fallible, which considerably affects users' trust and interaction with such agents. In this paper, we investigate two factors which can engender user trust in agents: reliability and attractiveness of agents. We show that it is not enough for agents to be simply reliable, they need to be attractive as well in order to encourage user interaction. Subjective user ratings of agent trust and perceived accuracy suggest that attractiveness may be even more important than reliability