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Category: media & arts – Page 30

Picking up good vibes from a stranger? That might be your neurons aligning

Imagine you’re sitting across from a friend, having a conversation.

I’m a die-hard Beach Boys fan. In one of their most famous songs, they sing about “pickin’ up good vibrations” from a girl. We’ve all felt those “good vibes” when we’re connecting with someone new. I used to think that feeling was a mysterious, mystical experience — something I couldn’t fully explain that bonded me with some friends and strangers more easily than others.

It turns out that “good vibes” aren’t as mysterious as I thought.

Pioneering neuroscientists have begun investigating how the brain works when we are interact ing with others — a technique they call hyperscanning. Neuroscientists have been using existing scanning methods, like MRI and EEG, to monitor the brain activity of two or more people as they do something together: for example, performing music, learning a poem, or having a conversation.

Music visualizer in the style of a Pong game

You know the classic game Pong with the paddles and ball that moves across the screen? Imagine the ball and paddles synchronized to music. Victor Tao approached the challenge as an optimization problem to figure out where the paddle and balls should go, based on the beats of a song:

Fortunately there is a mature field dedicated to optimizing an objective (screen utilization) with respect to variables (the locations of bounces) in the presence of constraints on those variables (physics and the beats of the song). If we write our requirements as a constrained optimization problem, we can use an off-the-shelf solver to compute optimal paddle positions instead of designing an algorithm ourselves.

The result is Song Pong, and the Python code is on GitHub. [via Waxy].