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Paralyzed musicians create beautiful sounds once again—using nothing but their brainwaves

The talent is still in their minds.

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A string quartet that needs no instruments

Imagine seeing a string quartet play beautiful music.

Strings are pretty much my favorite kind of instrument; it's hard for me to listen to a cello or violin and not feel something. And when you get four musicians all playing together? Beautiful.

In 2015, Plymouth University's Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Music Research and the Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability in London teamed up to create a spectacular string quartet.

But this wasn't your typical performance.

The musicians in this quartet all had severe motor impairments, which can affect a person's ability to move.

Motor impairments can be caused by a number of different things, such as a motor neuron disease like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (known as ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease). In severe cases, a person may not be able to move or speak at all.

For musicians like these folks, their condition would normally present a considerable barrier to being able to play music like they once did. But in this case, researchers and doctors found a way to let them play anyway.

The thought was this: If the musicians still have musical talent but simply can't do the physical motions, we'll just make it so they don't need to do any physical motions.

Researchers place device on the head of musician.

Image pulled from YouTube video

First, researchers put stretchy, cap-like devices that can read brainwaves on the musician's heads.

Then, during the performance, a computer screen presented the four musicians with selections of short different musical phrases.

The musicians could choose what phrase they wanted by simply looking at it. The caps then picked up these brainwaves and sent the information to four other, nearby musicians who played the music for them (so, technically, maybe this would be an octet).

The end result was brilliant — four motor-impaired musicians, picking and playing in real-time to create beautiful music, all with their brainwaves.

One of their performances was captured in this short, nine-minute documentary by Tim Grabham and professor Eduardo Reck Miranda, who spearheaded the project.

Check out their brilliant performance here:

Brain-computer interfaces have gotten us this far and are taking us further still.

We've already seen brain-computer interfaces that can help us control prosthetic arms with thoughts and restore senses of hearing and touch to folks without them.

There's a lot more work to be done in these fields, of course, but one day soon, we might be hearing, seeing, and visiting a lot more performances and projects like this.

This article originally appeared on 10.25.16

science

Can music help at-risk students succeed? This woman has set out to prove it can.

True

In 1997, Margaret Martin had an experience that would change her life forever.

Her 5-year-old son was playing Brahms on the violin at the Hollywood Farmers Market when a group of teenage boys closed in around them.

Her first instinct was fear.

But she quickly realized the young group just wanted to listen to the beautiful piece by the young violinist, and it warmed her heart.

All images via Harmony Project, used with permission.

This sparked her idea for Harmony Project — a program that promotes positive development for at-risk teens through the practice and performance of music.

No stranger to hardship, Martin is a survivor of domestic violence and sexual assault, and she was homeless for a year. She still managed to put herself through college, studying Social Science. By age 43, she received her master's and doctoral degrees from the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health.

That day at the farmer's market inspired her to help others access the kinds of educational opportunities she found — no matter their background.

“I view it as a human rights issue because I believed every child that shows up at school deserves a chance at their own complete education,” she says.

During her studies, Martin learned that an impoverished environment, i.e., life in a “poor household or violence-fueled neighborhood,” could potentially alter a child’s brain development and prevent them from learning.

Studies have also shown, for example, that for mothers who have not completed their high school education, the reading and math proficiency of their children was deeply impacted.

Martin was confident that music — especially collaborative music — could help these kids boost their academics.

“We call it mentoring through music,” Martin explains.

Through musical education — specifically, teaching kids to play instruments in group settings — Martin's program was founded on the belief that music had the potential to positively benefit a child's academic studies.

A study of Harmony Project kids showed improvement in their brain's ability to distinguish similar-sounding syllables, which is a skill linked to literacy. The benefits reaped from playing and listening to music occur in the same areas of the brain that are traditionally weaker in children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Therefore, strengthening one area strengthened the others.

In other words, these group music lessons help their brains develop and become more receptive to new knowledge.

By learning the language of music and performing with confidence, the kids involved in Harmony Project can go on to mimic the lessons they learn in music class in their everyday lives, helping them in all their school subjects and improving their grades.

Today, the program is helping over 2,000 students from low-income areas in Los Angeles.

A study of Harmony Project students found that those who were more engaged with the program showed increases in reading scores, while those kids less engaged did not show improvements.

In addition, an overwhelming 93% of Harmony Project seniors have enrolled in college in the past decade.

This is all the data Martin needs to know that her program is making a difference in these kids' lives.

Many of the kids love the program so much they use their weekend time to make a two-hour round-trip commute on Saturdays.

One former Harmony Project student named Paolo Sayo says that he enrolled in the program in sixth grade as an immigrant from the Philippines. Without Harmony, he and his family didn’t have the resources to continue his violin lessons.

Once he enrolled, not only did he get the lessons, he also got better at music practice, and his grades in other subjects went up too.

“Before I joined, I hated the practicing aspect of violin. I just wanted to get it over with,” Sayo says. “After a while, I started appreciating practicing more. Having that discipline transferred to my school work, where I eventually became an honor student.”

Today, he’s studying to be a health care administrator, but his time with the Harmony Project was so beneficial that he has decided, 10 years later, to remain a mentor for current students.

The program has a 2-4-year wait list, so Martin is working hard to help expand the program.

Harmony Project is also winning recognition. In 2009, it took home the Coming Up Taller Award at the White House, the nation’s highest honor for an arts-based youth program, from President Obama.

Martin is hoping to use the accolades to help expand the Harmony Project nationwide. Music education and other arts programs have been claiming to boost overall grades for decades, but there’s nothing like a handshake from the President to prove that it’s striking the right note and people are taking notice.

Heroes

Have a look at how origami is revolutionizing the medical industry.

The art of paper-folding is making surgery more efficient and less traumatic. It could even save you money.

Staying in the hospital after surgery isn't exactly cheap.

There are over 50 million in-patient surgeries in the United States each year. They're not always easy on people, and they're certainly not cheap; according to the Kaiser Foundation, a day in a U.S. hospital costs, on average, over $2,200. That's the cost of a used car! That's 7.5 weeks of minimum-wage pay! That's 9,800 Chicken McNuggets!

No matter how you look at it, $2,200 in post-op costs at the hospital is some serious coin, so anything that helps patients heal faster after surgery is a huge benefit.

What if we told you one key to a speedier and cheaper recovery looks like this?

Image from Andreas Bauer/Wikimedia Commons.

Yep. That's origami — the craft of folding paper — and it's a big source of inspiration for engineers who are working to innovate on health care tools.

Of course, hospital-grade origami isn't exactly what your third-grader is learning in arts and crafts class:

All GIFs from Bringham Young University/YouTube.

These new origami-inspired tools are being developed by researchers at Utah's Brigham Young University.The beauty and genius of the designs lie in their simplicity; instead of creating an ever-increasing number of moving parts, researchers are putting that tendency in reverse, instead relying on folds and self-contained hinges to do the same job.

It's an entirely new way to think about medicine, and it could revolutionize robotic surgery.

Here's one example of an origami-inspired tool, which turns the classic origami chompers into miniature forceps.

An enlarged version of the origami-inspired forceps prototype.

The result is a super-small tool with the ability to do more delicate work than current technology allows.

In other words, the new tools will create smaller, more precise cuts, making for less traumatic and less invasive surgery.

Smaller cuts and less invasive surgeries mean patients will be out of the hospital and back on their feet in as little time as possible. After all, a lot of what you're recovering from after undergoing surgery is the giant hole that surgeons cut in your body to get to whatever needed fixing. A less invasive surgery means fewer things your body needs to heal.

"That's really probably the most important thing," says professor Larry Howell, one of the researchers on this project. The goal, he says, is to reach the point where surgery is so minimally invasive it doesn't even leave a scar. "And we're actually starting to be able to approach that size."

If you think these new forceps look clumsy, think again. These guys make sewing a suture look like poetry in motion:

One of the coolest things, Howell says, is seeing how art can inform science.

The limits of this technique seem bound only by designers' imaginations. Scientists can discover designs in art that wouldn't have been immediately obvious with traditional engineering. That has the potential to lead to a host of amazing inventions.

One idea the BYU researchers highlighted was foldable inserts that could one day be used to replace damaged cartilage in the spine:

Image used with permission from BYU.

The team, which has previously done work for NASA developing solar arrays and other equipment, used a similar approach when coming up with the ideas like the spinal insert — taking something big, making it as small as possible in order to get it where it needs to go, then unfurling it when it's needed.

Devices like this have the potential to de-complicate incredibly complicated surgeries. Already minimally invasive techniques like the ones being developed at BYU have allowed doctors to perform certain kinds of cardiac surgery as outpatient procedures.

This is the kind of work that's inspiring, useful, and — let's be honest — really cool-looking. Elegant solutions like these will hopefully turn future surgeries from something onerous into something awesome.