Sonification of EEG signals based on musical structures

This short communication proposes a new method to translate human EEG recordings into music. The sonification method is based on the relation of primary concepts of musical composition to different time-frequency characteristics of electrical signals from the brain that give information about the mental states. In general terms, normalization and thresholding procedures were applied to wavelet transforms of analyzed signals in order to extract amplitude and frequency parameters that were mapped to several synthetic or natural sounds following basic musical composition structures. The method seeks to provide a new perspective about the brain activity by means of an auditory feedback which not only facilitates the long term monitoring in clinical contexts like polysomnographics studies or epilepsy but also offers a new tool for a self-understating of the different human body processes modulated by the brain.