Passive BCI is very underused in the creative arts. The main focus for the majority of applications using BCI is for the participant/performer to actively and consciously engage in particular brain activity, in order to initiate or control a response in a connected system (Ahn et al., 2014). The originality in my work, and the aims of this research, is to harvest passive BCI (an unintended by-product) and use that data to feed into a closed loop system. The closed loop system in this implementation comprises an improvising instrumentalist, a generative score producing audio/visual content and a participant engaged in active listening. The causal flow within this looped system is initiated by the initial state of the generative score, which produces a stimulus for the improvising musician. The other participant engages in concentrated listening to the musician and generative system, and if the intensity of their focused attention reaches a threshold point, their brain activity will trigger a change in the audio/visual score. This is a by-product of their listening and not initiated with any intent.  In the submitted book chapter I have combined and extended Donald’s concept of Cognitive Cultural Networks (Donald, 20080 and Di Scipio’s notion of Eco-Systemic Composition (Di Scipio, 2003) in devising the concept of ‘cognitive ambience’, to describe this situation, where brain activity generated by a humans involuntary response to their environment, can be harvested and used to create a perceivable change in that environment. This is a precursor to further work I intent to carry out in this area, where machine learning algorithms are trained on EEG data, collected from a musician’s passive reactions to their own improvisation, which then uses the model to generate a musical accompaniment in real-time during performance.

 Ahn, M., Lee, M., Choi, J. and Jun, S. (2014). A review of brain-computer interface games and an opinion survey from researchers, developers and users. Sensors. Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, 14(8), pp. 14601.

Di Scipio, A. (2003). “Sound is the interface”: From interactive to ecosystemic signal processing. Organised Sound  , 8(3), pp. 269–277.

Donald, M. (2008). How culture and brain mechanisms interact. In: C. Engel and W. Singer, eds., Better than conscious? Decision making, the human mind, and implications for institutions  . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 191–207.