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Live EEG performance at the DETUNE festival

4 minutes ago
3 min read



The DETUNE Latvian Composers Electronic Music Festival took place on 18-19 September 2026 with 11 performances and a conference at the Žaņa Lipkes memorial in Riga.


At the conference I shared the latest developments of my work on Brain-Computer Music Interfacing, using the software GrafitPro developed by the genius visual artist and inventor Martins Dabolins.


For the concert, I teamed up with saxophonist Arvydas Kazlauskas, with whom I have played in the free improvisation group Endless Roar for over a decade. In this concert we wore EEG headsets and ran a GrafitPro patch which visualized inter-brain synchronization in real-time. This was the first time I used GrafitPro in a live performance, having worked with it now for about 3 months.


The visuals consisted of 3 modes which all used a face tracking camera to position visual systems on a screen.


In the first mode I used liquid simulation which changed color according to the frequencies at which synchronization was taking place. Blue liquid was driven by low frequency synchronizations, red liquid by mid frequencies, and green by high frequencies. This had the effect of mixing RGB light, such that when all three frequency bands showed increased synchronization the liquid would turn white.


In the second mode I used a point cloud system which visualized both inter and intra-brain synchronization. When inter-brain synchronization increased, points that hovered over our heads would merge to form a torus shape in the center of the screen. When intra-brain synchronization increased, points would gather over the respective head in which it was occurring.


In the third mode I used particle systems emitting sparks color coded to frequency bands where increased inter-brain synchronization was occurring. Increased inter-brain synchronization also increased the strength of a vortex field and an attractor field at the centre of the screen, causing particles to fly towards the centre and spin.


We spent many enjoyable hours rehearsing the music and testing the visual in the garage. The music itself was structured around 3 movements, one for each visual mode. The first movement was ambient and peaceful, with Arvydas exploring many timbral modulations and colors, looping them and adding effects with his pedals, while I played synthesizer pads on my MicroKorg Vocoder.


In the second movement we made a sudden change into free improvisation material, with Arvydas playing rapid melodic phrases, multiphonics and wild glissandos, building up a dense texture of sounds with his loop pedal, while I switched to Yamaha DTXpress electronic drum pads my father bought me in the 90s when acoustic drums were just too loud for the apartment. It was rather strange at first to play rapid free-improvisation drums on rubber pads, but I soon got accustomed to it and tried to use the electronic sounds to their best effect.


In the third movement Arvydas switched to a tabletop drum machine and began to interact with me on the electronic drum pads, giving call-and-response gestures to each other as he built up the rhythmic complexity using various randomizers, sudden tempo changes and noise. I then switched back to the MicroKorg vocoder and an iPad running Seaboard 5D, a Seaboard instrument simulator which allows you to glissando and change timbres by gliding your fingers on the screen.


Overall it was thrilling to play, and the visual turned out beautiful, powerful and most essentially, playful. I'm grateful to the venue and festival organizers in particular Rolands Kronlaks, my composition teacher from 2012-2015. I am also very grateful to Martins Dabolins for his amazing support in GrafitPro which is really capable of much more than how I used it in this concert. I look forward to continue exploring live EEG interactions in this brilliant tool and am excited to see where it may lead.


Links to more information on the DETUNE music festival:

• Facebook event: https://fb.me/e/9YqauABQ5


 
 
 

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©2019 by Jachin Pousson Music.

Riga, Latvia

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