As a direct result of my interest in neuroscience, music, and playing electric bass, there are something that I’ve really wanted to build for a while. As I often work with in-vivo electrophysiology recording in mice, I have spent a long time looking at single-neuron firing when mice are doing all kinds of behaviors. Staring at the spike trains of these neurons are pretty mesmerizing, as you can imagine these neurons are somewhere in the mouse brain and are actually firing action potential right now, and we are able to record them through an interface in its brain and see the spikes. The spike trains also seem pretty random at first, but when you look at it long enough there seems to be patterns and motifs. We sometimes even play the spikes as audio to monitor the changes in firing rate as our ears are way more sensitive to frequency changes than our eyes.
This inspired me to explore the integration of neuronal firing and music, on which I currently have two perspectives. One is to make an instrument that has the common interface of the standard electrophysiology recording devices that we use during research, which I can then connect it with the electrodes on mice and create live music with neuronal signals. A spike could trigger a variety of sounds or serve to modulate other sounds, which should be able to encapsulate and embody the patterns among seemingly random neuronal firing. It might be able to connect with an EEG headset that will incorporate your brain signal as well, which can feel like you are jamming with the cute mice through brain signals. Another line of thinking lies in creating an effect pedal for electric bass from the neuronal firing spikes, which may be pre-loaded by a large dataset of spike train patterns and can modulate your bass signals in different ways.
The rough diagram