Artistic vs. Scientific Orientation

My background is classical piano performance. When I was young, I was always wondering; how they do it? How Beethoven, Debussy, and Ravel created their pieces? At 19 years old I quit playing piano and enrolled in a Sound Arts & Design course at University of the Arts London (UAL). I struggled to find my own voice until I found EEG and brainwaves.

Now all the music I make is with brainwaves – that’s how I approach music composition at the moment. As a young person in a big city, I was craving therapy, and creating brainwave music filled that hole. I very much enjoy gaining more scientific knowledge and building it into my work. A few people were at the core of my installation and performances – Tony Steffert and David Mayor. It was also important to meet others in this field, share technical and artistic practices, and grow through online communities of biohackers and interactive art practitioners.

Initial Motivation for Biofeedback Art

I am a fan of travelling with my headphones on and listening to music. My internal struggles made me more aware of what makes me feel good, and that awareness drew me to create a “helmet” for internal travels with an everchanging soundscape.

At UAL in 2013 I got acquainted with Max MSP. I didn’t understand it at the beginning, but I felt very attracted to it and appreciated the endless number of possibilities it could offer. My initial idea was to turn brainwaves into electronic music. After one performance I felt so calm, and the audience’s reaction was that they felt more relaxed than ever while listening to my brainwaves.

Later, I participated in an audio-visual interplay workshop in Italy and managed to connect my brainwaves to the room lights! I still want to explore that further. A Max MSP patch still exists somewhere on my laptop.

When I first tried Max MSP, I was mesmerized by the sinewaves, simple electronic signals. They reminded me of La Monte Young’s Dream House and Alva Noto’s minimalistic music. Later I had some psychological issues and couldn’t focus on anything except creating sounds for brainwaves (!).

“The brainwaves are likely to recognize themselves as you provide a playback and when this occurs, they alter to be more active, letting the user shape them to a desired frequency and train the brain to evolve higher levels of concentration, focus, and balance.” – Can somebody please confirm or deny such a statement?

I also met Fabio Garces, who was doing live shamanic and hypnotic beat sessions in London. He could go into a full meditative state within a few seconds (or maybe even one second), measured by Neurosky’s meditation algorithm. I wanted to be able to do the same – and I think I can now, after learning how to meditate and train my brain with neurofeedback.

Impact and Aspirations

Recently my life brought me back into classical music, and now I’m considering creating sheet music for piano with brainwaves. Or could I think of something more useful? I have friends who are interested in my work and suggest ideas about how it could benefit society.

For example, imagine special rooms in a party setting where people hear the music piece first, and then hear it transformed by their own brainwaves for comparison. This consciousness-altering practice could also be implemented in education.

As a music teacher, I noticed how many children nowadays have ADHD, emotional regulation issues, and autism. Decent research must be done in this field in a way that could change young lives – how they learn, how they approach emotional difficulties, and their social life in virtual worlds and beyond. Maybe they would even be more open to learning sound design, which in Lithuania still sounds like witchcraft.

Therefore, I am looking for someone to collaborate with on this subject using EEG, HRV, or breath. With strong research foundations, institutions such as Wellcome Trust, Horizon Europe, Falling Walls Engage, and Creative Informatics could be approached. Researchers, please feel free to reach out if the combination of neurofeedback and education sparks something in your mind.

Challenges & Growth

The main challenge at the moment is to make a newer version of the Muse EEG sensor work with my Max MSP patch, and to build an MVP with Max MSP RNBO. I have been working in this field for 12 years now, and the main things that shaped my work are education and experience in very different fields such as Entrepreneurship, Fine Arts, Web Development, Anatomy, Psychology, and Pedagogy.

Collaborations with various artists and researchers from different countries helped me create my sonic neurofeedback system as it exists now. Meeting with people at Exosphere Academy (UAL) in Brazil shaped my mind the most, as I got acquainted with philosophers, scientists, entrepreneurs, biohackers, and VR artists from around the globe.

I also studied blockchain – not really my field, but it helped me understand how NFTs work. Who knows, maybe this will be useful in the future. The biggest change can be seen in my performances, documented on my portfolio webpage (www.aistenoreikaite.wordpress.com).

From sinewaves I moved to sampled sounds that reveal when we are in the same wavelength – when the brain produces a prolonged constant state of consciousness. Later I assisted in multi-brain research, watched the theatre play The Encounter (which used a binaural head), and observed its adaptation into film (Star Wars). I then implemented similar approaches in my own performance in Cambridge after a workshop on Brainstorm software.

Then came Paris and Amsterdam, where I performed with a variety of sounds – one performance even used live data from a weather satellite, with help from my Exosphere friends. When I returned to Lithuania, I began giving more lectures, letting people try my work for themselves, while continuing performances. Tools & Methods One of the biggest breakthroughs in my work was discovering how to use EEG data in Ableton Live. I respect and admire that company for their work culture – I once visited their offices in Berlin and met their employees, who were relaxed yet deeply focused and passionate.

Later, I discovered a way to pass MIDI from Ableton into MuseScore, a notation software. Composing this way and then playing my pieces (not brainwave-generated ones) on piano was both calming and creative. The music produced by different brainwaves sometimes sounded like jazz, and other times like Brian Eno’s ambient music. Even now, I can hardly believe this discovery. Collaborations Talking to people from different fields gave me new perspectives on my work. At times I felt lost, but collaboration grounded me and strengthened my commitment.

Working with scientists helped me notice my strengths and weaknesses. For example, collaborating on Tony Steffert’s and David Mayor’s research project into electroacupuncture’s effect on EEG, HRV, and other biometrics gave me confidence and a deep understanding of the scientific domain and data analysis. Tony shared his knowledge of brainwaves during long drives to the lab outside London, while David, proficient in statistics, gave me a foundation in understanding data. That knowledge helped me carry out my own small research on Lithuanian folk songs.

My final dissertation at university was about the Fluxus art movement, and to my surprise, David had been an active Fluxus artist in the 1970s. Together, we combined inspirations and staged performances with performance artist Zoe Dowlen at the Contemporary Arts Centre in Bordeaux. These included It’s Not Alarm, It’s My Mother and Doing Nothing with Intensity (with Thibaut Cora), performing Yoko Ono’s Tunafish Sandwich, and simply playing brainwave feedback while playing chess.