DHS trials musical brainscan wellness tech on US firemen

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has unveiled plans to enhance the performance of firemen and federal agents by playing them special music synthesized from their own brain waves. "Every brain has a soundtrack," note the DHS Science & Technology people. "When that soundtrack is recorded and played back - to an …

[Jacob Reid]

Piano? meh.

I would love to get hold of an electric guitar version for myself though.

[Goatan]

Piano??

I fancy myself as more of a theramin man myself. Would be great to have a host of different instruments to play you music through.

[Niall]

Why Not

just order a bunch of blank tapes?

[Anonymous Coward]

What Kind of Music?

Soldiers: Thrash Music

Suicide Bombers: Emo

[Ray]

Reminds me of...

The Lathe of God, by Ursula Le Guin. Great novel, but according to some so-called "psyentists" is not really based on actual Psyence: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17022-can-internal-brain-music-be-used-in-therapy.html

Furthermore, the actual sounds used in these recordings is just a piano synthesizer. I don't know how much information they're actually encoding from brain waves in the music, but it's clearly not frequency data and therefore, can't leave these pseuds a whole lot left to work with. However, if you got the money, I will believe anything you want me to tell you to believe.

I call shenanigans.

[Gerard Krupa]

The next step...

...is to brainwash them all until everyone's mind is playing the Star Spangled Banner on an endless loop.

[Anonymous Coward]

Pianos

Wouldn't work on me - I f*cking hate piano music.

Now if it were done with lots of harmonic synths and a nice pounding bassline, that'd be a different story.

[Hud Dunlap]

I cry "Pelosi" on this.

Nothing but pork. This has nothing to do with Homeland security.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hillarious

US still has money to burn.

[Chris C]

re: I cry...

"Nothing but pork. This has nothing to do with Homeland security."

Are you really that daft? You don't consider first-responders to be part of a nation's security? Police officers will actively defend you against assaulting forces, so they most definitely are security. Firefighters will attempt to control a fire before it injures anyone or spreads to surrounding buildings, so that most definitely does count as security. Paramedics tend to the injured and save lives, which, in my opinion, counts as security. "Security" does not, and should not, mean "protection from external physical assaults" only.

I say most anything that can help first-responders do their job more efficiently and/or with less risk is a good thing.

[Bruno de Florence]

Dorémi

Any phenomena can be translated into or mapped onto any other phenomena. It all depends on the translating algorhithm. In this case, it could easly be tweaked to produce some Monteverdi (consonant) or Feyrnehough (dissonant). As such, I do not find this experiment to have any value whatsoever. Very hippie alltogether, but well done if you can get research money out of it.