‘BrainWave Chick’ Digitally Performs Mind Music

Paras Kaul wants you to listen to her brainwaves.

Ms. Kaul, director of Web communications at George Mason University, is better known as the “BrainWave Chick.” With electrodes and digital technology, she has devised increasingly sophisticated ways to perform the music of her mind. (It’s got an eerie, ethereal sound, something like Brian Eno’s ambient compositions.)

To project her brainwaves, Ms. Kaul wears a headband that presses three electrodes against her brain’s frontal lobe. A Bluetooth adapter transmits data to a laptop, where software converts brainwaves to a Musical Instrument Digital Interface, and synthesizers play it.

“All I have to do is be on stage and meditate,” Ms. Kaul says. She doesn’t like that word — meditate — but says that low-frequency brainwaves, those we produce when we quiet our minds, make the nicest music.

Audience members, she hopes, will recognize that. “I refer to it as a neurological learning process,” she says in her calm, soothing voice. “If we could exist less in an agitated brainwave state or a heightened anxiety state … we can have more clarity in our thought and make better decisions.”

Ms. Kaul has presented her cerebral melodies at the International Joint Conferences on Computer, Information, and Systems Science and Engineering, as the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Using actors’ brainwaves, she just produced a musical score for an independent film, Caller ID, due out this spring. —Sara Lipka