Disclaimer: This is transcribed using AI. Expect (funny) errors.
Mindy Peterson: [00:00:00] I’m Mindy Peterson, and this is Enhance Life with Music, where we explore the ways music can make our lives better and spotlight the resources you can use to enhance your life with music. I have a special place in my heart for anyone who has ever dealt with insomnia. I suffered from severe insomnia for several years. Fortunately, I was able to find a doctor who was able to resolve this for me. But I’m realizing more and more how common sleep disturbances are. And unfortunately, the older I get, the more I’m realizing how common they are for people as we age. And episode 188. Our topic was some recent research on soothing sleep with music for older adults, especially those with dementia, and I heard from a lot of listeners, this is definitely a topic of interest for a lot of people of all ages, and not just older adults with dementia. So I’m excited about today’s conversation. We’re exploring an app that provides scientifically created, functional music that helps in a lot of areas of life, including sleep. On its website, it sounds like the average time it can put you to sleep with this music is 10 to 15 minutes. It can help you sleep more deeply. As if that’s not enough, this app also offers music to help you focus and be more productive, relax on demand and has other applications as well to help you optimize your life. We’re talking today about Brain.fm. I love Brain.fm’s tagline: “Music Powered by Science. Get more done with less effort and unlock your best self on demand.” I’m in! Joining me today from Hawaii is Brain.fm’s director of science, Dr. Kevin Woods. Kevin has degrees from New York University and Harvard. He is passionate about harnessing the power of sound as an accessible tool to help people around the world. Welcome to Enhance Life with Music, Kevin.
Kevin Woods: [00:02:03] Thank you so much for having me on. This is wonderful.
Mindy Peterson: [00:02:06] I think, as you know, Kevin, I learned about Brain.fm through Erik Fisher and the Beyond the To Do List podcast. I know Erik is a big fan of Brain.fm. I’m a fan of his, so I’ve been wanting to feature Brain.fm for a while and finally got around to it. In researching Brain.fm, I discovered that another guest on my podcast, Erik’s been a guest, but also another guest of mine, Doctor Psyche Loui is Brain.fm’s Academic Collaborator. Shout out to her and Erik Fisher. I’ll put links in the episode notes to my interviews with those two. But when I saw that Dr. Loui was connected with Brain.fm, I reached out to her. She introduced us and I was so excited to learn more about Brain.fm. So starting out, how do you describe Brain.fm to people who aren’t familiar with it?
Kevin Woods: [00:02:53] Sure. So at the most basic level, I start by explaining why Brain.fm exists, which is to say, hey, these days there’s a disconnect between why people listen to music and why people create music. And if you go on Spotify, you can find music to cook to music to run to music to whatever, and of course, music to sleep to. Right. But this music wasn’t made for that purpose, right? In general, music in those playlists was curated, right? It was. Sure. Yeah. It was created by an artist to express their feelings or, you know, be beautiful or whatever else artists do. And it was co-opted, if you like. And often it does indeed have properties that are useful for the thing you’re trying to do. But the basic question that Brain.fm asks is, if we make music from the ground up to do this, can we do a better job than just curating? Right. And so that’s where we start and we say, okay, let’s take a step back, look at what you’re trying to accomplish. Look at how the brain, you know, the brain states that you have to be in to be sleeping or to be running or to be focusing and figure out how to use music to drive your brain into those states. And we very quickly find that, you know, sure, curating music that just so happens to have such and such properties may be okay, but you can actually do a lot better if you start from that perspective, right, with with the listener’s goals in mind. So that’s that’s where I start. Another level of…
Mindy Peterson: [00:04:27] Let me just interrupt real quick, because I love how you started that off with like, this disconnect between why music was created and why it’s being listened to. I mean, I haven’t heard it described that way, but that’s pretty profound.
Kevin Woods: [00:04:39] So and this is a new thing, right? 30 years ago, this was not an issue at all, right? Maybe even 20 years ago. This is purely a result of, you know, the digital age, having music available at all times and personal listening. Right. Everybody had iPods are no longer a thing. But you know, everybody has a way to listen to whatever music they want at any time. And so of course, you get this effect of what’s called functional music, right? Coming to the fore, which is, you know, I try to make this distinction between functional music with a capital F and art music with a capital A, but the fact is, 99% of music in the world is art music, right? And very little of it is made to be functional. But if you go way back in human history, functional music is some of the first music that existed. If you think about what a lullaby is, right?
Mindy Peterson: [00:05:29] Aha, sure.
Kevin Woods: [00:05:30] A lullaby is beautiful. It sounds nice, but really, ultimately it is. It has a function of putting a baby to sleep, and if it doesn’t do that, it’s not doing its job right. And so that’s an example of functional music you can think about, you know, music for, you know, working if you’re trying to do coordinated work with people like rowing oars on a ship, for example, you might need, you know, drums to coordinate bodily movements and things of that nature. You know, shamanism and medicine in many different traditions has functional music for healing the body. So these are very ancient forms of music. But, you know, in the last several hundred years, there’s been this thing of no, no, no, music is for expressing feelings and purely for being beautiful. And now with the technology, we’re coming back around to this ancient way of relating to music, which is what does it do for us? Right.
Mindy Peterson: [00:06:22] Wow, that’s really fascinating to think about too. Yeah, that we’re returning back to sort of music’s ancient roots, because when you think about music from ancient times, it was used militarily, you know, for coordinating, marching or, you know, that type of thing, or on boats rowing together. And, uh, gosh, I’m not good on video games. But I remember a piano student’s mom early on in when this podcast was very young, talking about one of the video games uses these sea shanties. And that’s a reflection on ancient use of music with people like all of these rowers rowing together to move these boats. So yeah. And then we’ve moved up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs down through generations to now. We’re able to have the luxury of using music to just express ourselves. But there still is this very, um, applicable use of music functionally for different purposes.
Kevin Woods: [00:07:24] Absolutely. And so the result of making, you know, art, music with a capital A is that you end up with music that is made to grab your attention. Right? And if you’re a good music producer, you use words like punchy or bright or shiny because you want to make people sit up and turn their head and request the song on the radio, or what have you.
Kevin Woods: [00:07:46] But really, when you’re making functional music, really for any purpose, it’s kind of like a background, right? And yeah, you don’t need it to have the hooks and the drops and the breaks, right. You just need it to do its thing. And so all these sort of rules of music production that exist now of, you know, oh, I have to use my compressor and my reverb to make the thing really pop. Well, that stuff doesn’t really apply when it comes to functional music. And so the musicians at Brain.fm had to really figure out this new way of making music where they’re flipping a lot of these production rules on their head. They’re saying, hey, actually, this is mostly music that’s made to be ignored, as weird as that sounds, right? And especially when it comes to something like sleep, the last thing you want to do is have music that’s going to grab your attention. Right? Um, but also true for focus and for meditation, for really everything we do. And so, yeah, they had to relearn how to make music.
Mindy Peterson: [00:08:46] So tell us a little bit more about the science behind sort of creating this music from the ground up for a specific purpose.
Kevin Woods: [00:08:54] Absolutely. So the simplest way of saying it is that we make music that is designed to change the patterns in your brain, and in fact, it does. And we’ve shown that it does. Right?
Kevin Woods: [00:09:05] It changes the patterns in your brain. And by patterns in your brain, we mean neural oscillations or brain waves if you like. Right. Okay. And so sort of our core technology is around shifting what your brainwaves are doing, making some oscillatory regime, some brainwave frequencies stronger, making some weaker, that kind of thing. But that’s really just the core of a bag, of a whole bag of tricks that we have. And so if you if you were to talk about sleep music, for example, right, you certainly don’t want to throw on Spotify and have the track changing every 3 to 5 minutes. Right? That’s a, that’s a disaster. You really want you want a single track of music that’s eight hours long because the brain is a change detector. And this is a really important thing about sleep is that, you know, it’s not so much about the absolute loudness or what’s going on in the music, it’s that you don’t want things to change, right? But in any case, the something as basic as the length of the music you’re making is another one of the tricks in our bag. So the brain. Yeah, the brainwave thing is the cool sciency thing that’s at the core of our tool set. But we, you know, we make very long tracks. We do things like reducing brightness. So instead of bright and shiny things, you have, um, you basically reduce the treble and you reduce what are called salient events, right? Things that are surprising that grab your attention. Right?
Kevin Woods: [00:10:31] Like snare hits that are slightly off the beat, right. Or cymbal crashes or a guitar solo. Right. The last thing you want in the world if you’re trying to sleep or study is a guitar solo. And so, you know you’ll build something that’s more repetitive. But the issue is, how do you make something that is repetitive and made to be ignored, yet is not annoying as heck and boring and just the same thing over and over.
Kevin Woods: [00:10:57] It’s this really interesting, fine line that our musicians have to walk of. Yeah, of making optimal background music essentially that stimulates the brain in the right way and yet does not jump out. Grab your attention and do what you don’t want it to do. But but again, at the most basic level, we’re making music that is designed to change your brain, to shift your brain states towards what you need to do. And it does this not only with our core technology, which, if we want to get sciency about it, is amplitude modulation, right. Rapid changes in loudness that affect your brainwaves, but also things like making the tracks super long, making sure they’re not too bright, reducing surprising events, and so on and so forth.
Mindy Peterson: [00:11:37] Well, and I did notice in the the three day, there’s a free three day trial of your product for anybody. And during my explorations of that, I noticed that you can be very specific on on setting your your settings. If you want acoustic type music, classical piano, rock, if you want nature sounds, if you want something that’s electronic, you know there’s so many different selections that you can really create your settings so that you’re not getting something that’s annoying, you’re getting something that you’re going to enjoy, and you kind of use that science, but layer music on top of it in some way. And with a science, is it kind of like you you mentioned the brain waves and the was it the neural oscillations?
Mindy Peterson: [00:12:26] So do you start with that in terms of creating this music? Start with what you want the brain waves to be and then sort of go from there.
Kevin Woods: [00:12:36] In a sense, the music comes first. And when it comes to genres we make sure that there’s wide variety of genres, because preference is always going to be a thing that is super important and the science cannot touch that. What we have to do. Right, right. Um, you know, it’s. Yeah. It’s not a it’s not a question for science. If you dislike a genre of music because of, you know, past experience or whatever the culture you grew up in. Um, yeah, but but our job is to make sure that the, the science part of it that affects your brain waves can be worked in to any of the genres that are in there. So the way that works is we might start, for example, with focus. We say, okay, we want to target beta brainwaves, which we know to be between 12 and 20Hz. It’s about the speed of a helicopter if you kind of think about it. Da da da da da da da da da da da, right.
Kevin Woods: [00:13:28] And so now we say, okay, we have, you know, electronic music, we have nature sounds, we have all these genres. And we have to make sure that that rapid modulation is embedded into that music in a way that is effective but not annoying. That’s really, really tricky. And, you know, one of the things that has to be done is that it has to be aligned to the beat when there is a beat. It has to be aligned to the beat. If there is no beat, we have to make sure that the modulation exists in frequency bands where there is energy and not where there. Anyway, we don’t have to get too far into the technical details, but in terms of what comes first. Yes, the brainwaves come first in the sense that, you know, you have to have a particular modulation rate to drive the brain to do a thing. But also the music comes first in terms of the actual production of the thing. Like in a literal sense, the musicians will make the underlying music before the brainwave aspect is added onto it.
Mindy Peterson: [00:14:26] Well, I know you have a lot of the science, the science behind the product available on your website. You also have some pictures of brains, sort of under the influence of Brain.fm versus under the influence of just a Spotify playlist, or like white noise or pink noise or brown noise or, you know, whatever the latest color is. Um, so it’s, you know, I encourage listeners to go online and take a look at some of the science that’s available on there, just because we’re limited in the time that we have here with how deep we can go into that. But it’s really interesting to check that out. And I know just the the couple days that I was able to use it before the weekend hit and we had out of town guests. And, you know, that was kind of the end of that. But the couple nights that I was able to use it prior to our conversation right now, I did sleep really well those nights. So I am really looking forward to continuing to use this because even though I don’t, thank goodness, have insomnia anymore, sleep issues are still sort of my weak link. Like if anything is off, I’m going to either have problems falling asleep or staying asleep. So I am really looking forward to using this some more and experimenting with it. I know I have family members, I have friends who I think will also really get into this. So I’m really excited to to try that. I have a whole bunch of questions I would love to ask you. I1i know, I know, Brain.fm is supported by the National Science Foundation. There’s more information on that on your website. Can you just tell us a little bit more about what that relationship is, or do they fund research that you do? What’s that relationship?
Kevin Woods: [00:16:07] So thanks to actually Doctor Psyche, Louis and her group over at Northeastern University, we were awarded a National Science Foundation grant to support our research, specifically in ADHD and to create music to help people with ADHD. Not as a cure, not as a anything else like that, but really just a tool to use while you’re focusing. Right. And a simple way to explain what we ended up making is something like an auditory fidget spinner.
Kevin Woods: [00:16:42] A fidget spinner is a little thing you play with it. It’s sort of like absorbs some attentional capacity, yet is easy to ignore, but fulfills this need for self stimulation that the ADHD brain has. Right. And if you listen to our focus music, that’s what you hear. It’s this da da da da da da da da da da. That’s really easy to ignore. And yet, like a fidget spinner is providing this subtle stimulation that’s sort of replacing the shaking of a leg or the twiddling of thumbs or what have you, but it’s doing it through music.
Kevin Woods: [00:17:14] Yeah. And that’s that’s a simple way to explain it. There’s also a brain wave neural oscillation story, but that it’s basically an auditory fidget spinner. And so we use that funding. We did some really awesome neuroimaging work at Lewis Lab at Northeastern. And that was actually just published two months ago in a really great nature journal called Communications Biology.
Mindy Peterson: [00:17:36] Ooh, I’ll get the link to that so I can put that in the episode notes.
Kevin Woods: [00:17:38] Yes, yes. And you can find that you can definitely find that online. It’s open access. But there we did EEG work, which is looking at electrical currents at the scalp, which indicates brain activity. We also did functional MRI, which looks at blood flow inside the brain. And we did behavioral work looking at performance on a sustained attention task. And with all of that measures, we found that there’s really something special happening with this music in comparison, not only to Spotify focused music, but also in comparison to exactly the same underlying music without that modulation. And this was the really cool thing, is that usually when people go out and they do music comparisons and try to publish a paper, it’s, you know, oh, I tested heavy metal versus classical music. And I found that classical music was better for. Well, there are a million things that are different. Is it the tempo? Is it the timbre of the instruments? Is it the, you know, the nature of the vocal. Right. And so to do a really well controlled experiment, you need to take exactly the same underlying music and just change one thing. And that one thing that we changed was the amplitude modulation that drives brain waves. The thing that I’ve described as being a helicopter helicopter. Right. And we manipulated the rate of that modulation and the, the intensity of that modulation.
Kevin Woods: [00:18:55] And we found that only at the rate that we predicted to work based on what brain waves should be doing, only at that rate did performance improve for people with ADHD. And so this was it was a very precise prediction. If the rate was higher did not work, if the rate was lower did not work. So it wasn’t just about adding amplitude modulation, it was really about getting those modulations to line up with the brain wave regime that was known to be important for focus in these people. Right? So very, very cool stuff. And then in the neuroimaging component, similarly, we showed attentional networks were more active in response to this music. And in the EEG component we showed those brain waves themselves with a with a massive increase in the the strength essentially of those brainwaves. So it’s a really cool paper that has many, many experiments in it and took us took us a long time to do. But thanks to funding from the National Science Foundation, we got it done, got it published. Very proud of that work. And the technology there is available in the app. And so now in the app we have a special mode for ADHD. And you can go and you can go in there and you can flip a switch. And essentially it cranks the fidget spinner onto on a high. you know, mirroring what we saw in the paper. And people absolutely love it. My goodness.
Mindy Peterson: [00:20:13] Well, I know Erik Fisher has talked about that facet of Brain.fm quite a bit before, because that’s something that he really utilizes and has had, has found to really be helpful for him.
Kevin Woods: [00:20:24] It’s completely unique to us. It’s patented technology. We’re the only people that do this and it’s it’s really amazing stuff. Our position is that Brain.fm should not be a replacement for medication, that you can use it in conjunction with your medication, but we see it as a supplement and really where we feel brand FM is most useful for people in general, are for people that are not quite at the level where they need medication right now. Sure. And and it’s a huge swath of people. I think it was. Ohio University recently did a survey that you can find online where they polled people on the street and said, we understand that 5% of people are diagnosed with ADHD, but how many people think they have ADHD or have ADHD symptoms that don’t quite reach the level where they have to go see a doctor? And they went and talked to people on the street, and the number they got was 25%, I think.
Mindy Peterson: [00:21:19] Well, I know so many people where either good friends where they know and and that they’re like, oh yeah, I’m sure I have ADHD, but I don’t really want to go on meds. I’m able to manage it.
Kevin Woods: [00:21:31] That’s it. And so so those people we call subclinical, right. And so if, if even if only 5% of the population have clinical ADHD, you have another maybe 20%, maybe even more that have subclinical ADHD. And what are they going to do? Right. And moreover, what about people who are in countries or, you know, places in the world where psychiatric help is not so easy to get, where medications are actually banned? A lot of places or people who don’t have access for any number of other reasons. Right. And so, you know, Brain.fm, for for the price of a sandwich a month, we can provide you something which really helps, you know, get the job done while you’re using it.
Mindy Peterson: [00:22:13] Well, whenever you can reduce your dependence on meds or make them even more effective by something that’s non-addictive something that doesn’t have side effects and risks, why not? Especially when it comes to something like sleep. I mean, when I was dealing with insomnia, my doctor was kind of like, I don’t know what’s going on, but I can give you a prescription sleeping pill for it. And I looked at the laundry list of side effects, and it was like, not sure if that’s going to be any better than what I’m dealing with now, but I know you’ve gotten a lot of testimonials from people who have used Lunesta or Ambien or some other kind of med, and have really just been thrilled with the results that they’ve got from Brain.fm. Anything else you want to say about that?
Kevin Woods: [00:22:57] Oh, well, people do absolutely love Brain.fm. I mean, our our reviews are always glowing and I’ve, I hardly ever see negative reviews, which is really amazing. Um, but in terms of sleep specifically. Yeah, people people just really find that it works. I can go into a little bit of why sleep music is effective and particularly.
Kevin Woods: [00:23:19] Yeah. What we do to try to make it more effective. Great. Yeah. At the most basic level. Right. As with all functional music, you have different aspects of the music that are doing different things, right. And with sleep you have a very basic level which is just masking, right? And that’s just, hey, I want some sound to drown out other sounds, which might be worse for my sleep. Whether it’s traffic noise, you know, honking, the people next door arguing, you know, leaves rustling outside, whatever it is, I want to replace that intermittent noise that, again, you know, the brain is a change detector, right? The worst thing is having things turn on, turn off, turn on, turn off. And I want to replace that.
Mindy Peterson: [00:24:04] That sense of hearing is one thing we can’t turn off. It’s always on.
Kevin Woods: [00:24:09] And and the auditory system, one of the really important things for it, in terms of survival is that it is your, uh, your alert system. Right? It’s it’s yeah, it’s protecting you when it’s dark, right. When you’re sleeping. And so and so that makes your auditory system really sensitive to surprising events in the world when you’re sleeping. And in the modern world that we live in today, that is an issue for a lot of people. And so you want to replace things in your environment that are intermittent and surprising and annoying and going to wake you up, and you want to replace that with something stable. You want to cover that stuff up, mask it with something stable. So that’s that’s the most basic level of what sleep Music is doing. But hey, a white noise machine can do that too. Actually, you know, ask me about white noise versus other colors of noise later. White noise is actually not really great, but noise. Period, right. Something something that sounds like a short hiss or whatever. Right. That’s. Yeah. That’s masking. It’s going to cover up the other stuff. But then on another level you want something that’s, you know, not just covering up, but is also particularly stable that it has some like statistical regularity to it that your brain won’t hear as an alert signal.
Kevin Woods: [00:25:22] Right. So what I mean is say say I have street noise. I find the street noise makes it hard to sleep, so I cover it up with music from Spotify. Oh my goodness, I’ve just made a mistake. Because that music itself contains surprising events, right? It contains track changes or guitar solos or what have you. So it’s not enough just to cover up outside sounds. You want to cover up the outside sounds with something that is particularly stable. So that’s like level two, level three. Now we get into things like being soothing, right. The emotional state that you want to be in sort of lull you to sleep. Right. Something like a lullaby. Your mother’s voice, you know, nature sounds babbling brook, what have you. That is undeniably super important. And then eventually we get to talking about the real science, and then we get back into brainwaves. And when you dig deep enough, you know you’re going to find a capital N neuroscience explanation for what’s going on. And here you have to talk about delta waves, right? Slow wave sleep. And the sleeping brain is dominated by these neural oscillations, brain waves that are very slow. We’re talking about one cycle every two seconds to maybe one cycle per second. That’s like waves on a beach. Speed, if you like. Right. And it turns out you can actually encourage that neural activity by having sound that is modulated in that way. And it’s a similar mechanism.
Mindy Peterson: [00:26:51] So that level is sort of where we get beyond the sound machine, the fan that you have turned on in the background or even I don’t know if Spotify has this, but I think there are certain apps that will give you just sort of like lo fi sound. So there’s other places where you can get those first few levels. But now the level that you’re talking about is where the science of Brain.fm comes into play.
Kevin Woods: [00:27:15] Exactly. You want something that’s going to mirror sleeping brain waves is probably the simplest way to say it.
Kevin Woods: [00:27:23] And to drive brain waves into this state, just like what I was saying with focus. So that turns out to be, you know, very important. And that’s something that.
Mindy Peterson: [00:27:31] And is that sort of that entrainment characteristic of music that allows this to work?
Kevin Woods: [00:27:36] I was going to avoid using that big word, but entrainment is exactly the right term. So the way to explain entrainment, which is what I’ve been talking about, is to say that the rhythms in the brain, mirror rhythms in the world. And if I, you know, hear a drum beat or I clap my hands at a certain speed, you have activity in the brain that is moving at that speed, right? Now, it’s also the case that rhythmic activity in the brain is doing other things. It’s supporting focus, it’s supporting sleep. And those things actually interact surprisingly didn’t have. Yeah. It didn’t have to be the case. But it does turn out to be the case.
Mindy Peterson: [00:28:18] So it’s a similar function of the brain to being able to clap with the music. Or you hear a certain beat, a certain song and you want to start dancing, or you’re in a concert and you and everybody else is sort of experiencing some of the same emotions and bonding somehow together by hearing this music and sort of clapping and moving together to it.
Kevin Woods: [00:28:40] That’s exactly right. And when when people ask me, hey, how long does it take for Brain.fm to affect your brain? You know, the conservative answer we like to give is oh, five minutes or 3 to 5 minutes. Because when we do our behavioral tests, the length of the experimental blocks we have are 3 to 5 minutes. And that’s kind of the limit of our resolution. And we can see that your performance on a task changes after 3 to 5 minutes. But in fact, the analogy with dancing or clapping your hands is a much better one. And I would say to you, hey, how long does it take between hearing a song that makes you want to dance and actually moving your leg to the beat?
Kevin Woods: [00:29:19] It’s much faster than 3 to 5 minutes. It’s, you know, maybe 10s, maybe 20s, depending on what you’re paying attention to. But that’s the that’s the kind of time scale we’re talking about in terms of music affecting the brain and those effects on the brain being able to influence all of your brain functions, which is entrainment. And that’s. Yeah, it’s a very, very fast thing.
Mindy Peterson: [00:29:40] Well, one other thing that I read that I want to just mention that I thought was really cool is some of the sound, the 3D sound that’s in Brain.fm’s music. It allows sound to shift from one ear to the other, and it creates this rocking in a hammock type effect, which I thought, ooh, just just hearing that description is kind of relaxing to me. So I thought that was really cool. Um, one thing that was really neat too, that I read, is that your response improves as you use the app, and the app sort of learns what’s working for you. There’s a lot of areas where you can give feedback with either a thumbs up or a thumbs down. And so the app kind of learns what works for you personally and individually. And so your response and experience is going to continually improve. Also, the product is continually improving through the ongoing clinical trials and studies and research that you’re doing. You personally, I think, do a lot of this research, right.
Kevin Woods: [00:30:35] Yes, absolutely. With the help of Dr. Psyche and the people at Northeastern. Yeah, absolutely. But but yeah, we do we do the research in-house. And you know, when I actually when I started with the company, I was skeptical. I was, you know, just out of grad school. And I was like, I don’t I don’t know if music can really do this. And it took me running the studies for me to sign on with the company.
Mindy Peterson: [00:30:58] Oh, interesting. Interesting. Well, again, back to the the fact that if this can help people reduce their reliance on meds, if it can amplify the effect of meds, I mean, the non-medicated sleep is always going to be the best in the long run. So if you can reduce that reliance all the better. It’s we’re talking about next-gen lullaby here with Brain.fm’s music.
Kevin Woods: [00:31:26] That’s a great frame I love that next. Next-gen lullaby. I’d like to take that for marketing, please.
Mindy Peterson: [00:31:33] Go for it. Do you have any recommendations on what kind of speakers or headphones or earbuds? People should listen to this if they’re using it for sleep or any other purpose for that matter. I mean, I know when I was dealing with insomnia, I at one point got this headphone. It was like a headband that was really soft and had flat earbuds in it. So if you’re a side sleeper, which I am, they were comfortable and you could still hear, but I know there’s also bone conduction devices. I’m wondering if that would work for people who have hearing issues and they’re taking their hearing aids out at night. What recommendations do you have for people in terms of what devices or headphones or earphones they should be using to listen to this music?
Kevin Woods: [00:32:17] Sure, headphones are usually recommended over loudspeakers for starters. The exception is if you cannot find comfortable sleep Sleepphones for your head or for your sleeping position. And yes, they make the headband ones with very flat speakers. But if you find yourself in a situation where, hey, I’ve tried what are supposed to be the most comfortable, this is me, by the way. I’ve tried what are supposed to be the most comfortable sleepphones. And you know what? It’s still messing with my sleep. At that point. We say, hey, go, go for the loudspeakers.
Kevin Woods: [00:32:49] With our focus music, though, headphones are always preferred for actually really interesting reasons having to do with acoustics, which is that in almost any space you’re going to be working in, there’s significant reverb of sound bouncing off the walls. Right? And the modulation rate, the rapid, you know, in the focus, music gets muddy as it bounces off of walls. And so and so we really try to get people to use headphones whenever possible when it comes to our focus and relax and meditate. But with sleep, the speed of that modulation is so slow that the reverb is not an issue. And we would rather have people be comfortable. Um, you did mention bone conduction headphones. Interestingly, I recommend against those because they have very poor, uh, high frequency response. So sure, if you are hard of hearing or, you know, you can’t hear high frequencies anyway, then bone conduction headphones may be fine. I actually have a pair that I use for running when I don’t, you know, I don’t particularly care about sound quality or I don’t need the treble to carry information.
Kevin Woods: [00:33:56] Yeah, bone conduction headphones cut out a lot of treble range. And for our music, sometimes that treble range can be functionally important. So we really want the whole frequency spectrum to be in the music.
Mindy Peterson: [00:34:10] You mentioned focus. And I know we’ve touched on that a few times during our conversation. We’ve talked about sleep. You also mentioned just a second ago relax and meditate. I know those are the other sort of primary applications for Brain.fm. You also mentioned ADHD and how that is sort of maybe an unexpected application that people have had a lot of success in using Brain.fm for. Are there any other applications of Brain.fm? I mean, we don’t have time to get into all for focus, relax, sleep, meditate the way we’ve really gotten into the sleep today. But any other unexpected applications of Brain.fm that you want people to know about that are either active uses that people may be surprised about, or uses that are sort of in the works that are in development that you maybe can’t go into detail about, but want to just let people know are in the works.
Kevin Woods: [00:35:02] You’re going to get me in trouble here, but I’m going to go for it. I’m going to yeah, I’m going to spill the beans a little bit. We’ve had a segment of our users that started using our focus music to work out, and they discovered that particular genres, specifically electronic and a genre that we call grooves, that has a lot of sort of excitement in it. Those genres paired with the amplitude modulation at a very high intensity level, that helicopter thing, which is supposed to be just for people with ADHD if they use it, even if they don’t have ADHD and they’re at the gym. They found that it was having a really, really strong effect on their ability to push themselves. And and so now we do have a workout mental state that is in development. And I can’t say any more than that. We are really, really excited about it because workout is actually an area where you don’t necessarily have to make music to be ignored. Our our musicians can have a lot more fun. Right. Because when you’re exercising, you actually kind of want to be distracted, right?
Kevin Woods: [00:36:14] Music that’s listenable. So? So it’s a really fun sort of new frontier for us. I’m excited to do, you know, Research and figure out how much better it is than what’s standard now. Um, but I’ve used it myself, and there’s really something interesting happening there. What? For me, one of the first thing that happens when I listen to our focus music is I start shaking my leg. I have these motor motor movements, and there’s definitely something that’s being driven in my motor cortex by beta oscillations. And there’s a good theoretical underpinning for this. So, you know, I’ve already I’ve already said too much, but there’s something really exciting coming down down the road with workout and Brain.fm. But but yeah, that’s that’s sort of the unexpected one. Um, right now we’re really focused on ADHD and we’re really changing, um, changing the game for a lot of people with with ADHD.
Mindy Peterson: [00:37:05] Awesome. Well, I know a lot of people are in sort of still in their New Years resolution phase of sort of, you know, trying to establish these new lifestyle habits. In my mind, this is the like easiest modification ever that you can make to your lifestyle is just start listening to this. I mean, if you can improve your sleep, you’ll probably, just by virtue of that, improve your athletic performance because you’ll be rested, you’ll have more strength and energy. You’ll be able to focus more if you’re well rested. So, you know, there’s so many ways that you can improve your daily activities just by sleeping better. But then also focus. You know, this is something that you could use all day long, whether it’s working on homework, focusing at work, um, sleeping of course at night, relaxing in the evening, you can have your kids use it. So lots of really great applications for this. Like I said, I’m looking forward to using it more and continuing to tweak it according to my preferences so that it works more and more effectively for me. It’s available as a mobile app and web app. As I mentioned, there’s a free three day trial available for anyone. Just go to the website and you’ll see that button there to sign up for the three day trial. There’s no credit card needed for that. You can just click the button and start using it right away. Anything else that you want to mention that we haven’t had a chance to talk about that. You just want to make sure listeners hear before we wrap things up.
Kevin Woods: [00:38:30] Oh my goodness, I could I could go on for another hour, but I won’t. But I will. I will mention one very cool feature that we recently added, which is that now when you start brand FM, you actually take a little quiz where previously you had to interact with the music a lot to have it figure out what’s right for your brain. Now you answer five questions and we do a pretty good job, I think, of setting you up at your first listen with what we think will work best for you. And then of course, after that there is, you know, learning and you want to find things that are your favorites and whatnot. But we have this onboarding quiz now that I think is really, really cool and gets you a lot more quickly to what your brain needs.
Mindy Peterson: [00:39:13] Very cool. Well, looking forward to using this more. Kevin, thank you so much. As you know, I ask all my guests to close out our conversation with a musical ending, a coda by sharing a song or story about a moment that music enhanced your life. Do you have a song or a story that you can share with us in closing today?
Kevin Woods: [00:39:29] Ooh. So this is not so much a story as a concept or an idea that I wanted to pitch to people. Right. Which is what you might call the concept of the charitable machine in the age of AI, which is basically, in short, that you don’t have to pick between the conservatory and the computer, that you don’t have to pick between acoustic instruments and spending all your time in your digital audio workstation, that there’s a vast middle ground where technology can supplement expression without supplanting it. And the reason I wanted to sort of pitch this to people is that around me, in the world of music, I see this divide that’s getting more and more stark As I is progressing and technology is progressing, where you have the people that say, oh, you know, I love this, I’m going to become an electronic musician. And then you have the people that say, oh, I’m not technologically minded, I’m going to go back to playing my cello. And I hate to see that split, and I would love to see the gray area between that filled in more. And I think it’s more possible now than ever. And what I mean by the charitable machine is this is actually a term that was coined by the pianist Glenn Gould 50 years ago. He was a great interpreter. Um, but he he horrified traditionalists by suggesting that recording technology should allow listeners to pick whatever tempo they wanted. He said, I’m just going to record this at an arbitrary tempo, and when people play the record at home, they can they can choose what tempo they want to listen to, to my music at. Right. Absurd.
Mindy Peterson: [00:41:12] I can see that horrifying some people. The purists.
Kevin Woods: [00:41:17] Yes. And it never caught on. And I kind of get it. And, you know, maybe it doesn’t make sense, but what really matters is that he was thinking broadly about the role of technology in musical expression. Right. Versus these days, we tend to get stuck thinking about technology and music in terms of, okay, you have electronic instruments, you have digital production, and you have generative composition. And what what else is there? Right? It’s like, well, if I’m not interested in playing an electric guitar, I’m not interested in using Ableton or Sonar or whatever, you know, producer software. And I’m not interested in robots writing my music for me. Then, you know, I’m going to go back to playing my cello again, right? Or I’m going to, you know, and and sometimes these people, you know, take the purist approach that you were saying of, you know, vibrating wood is beyond anything that a computer can produce. You know, maybe. But the point is you don’t have to pick one or the other, right?
Mindy Peterson: [00:42:13] Sure, you can have the both.
Kevin Woods: [00:42:15] We tend to fear the machine or become one with it. And I think that’s not the right approach. I think that now more than ever, we should all be asking, well, how can we see technology as a useful friend to musical expression, something that that can be kept separate from us, but still has this boundless potential to show us wonderful things if we just explore. Right. Yeah. And you know, and not not. Yeah, you get the point. So I think that is a really important message to try to get out more and more as technology advances right before people get stuck in these camps. And if you did want to play a piece of music, I’ve sent something to you by way of example of what I mean, where I took Glenn Gould’s recording as a homage of Bach’s um, it’s a little prelude in C major Bach, BWV 924, I think it is. And I took this piano recording, and I actually extracted the timing and acceleration of the keystrokes, giving a Midi representation, essentially computerized representation of how his hands were moving on the keyboard. Then I applied various delays and reverb and resynthesis tricks, and created a sort of enhanced version that is still recognizably Glenn Gould playing piano, but it pulls out all of these hidden harmonies that are usually buried in the notes overtones in a really interesting way. And importantly, I did not compose additional voices. The piece is simple arpeggios, but what you’ll hear is something much more complex than that. But I did not write that music. I basically plugged in a couple of computer things and pulled something new out of the music, and everything that you hear was, in a sense, contained in that original music. And so it’s this really interesting in-between space of, you know, it’s not generative music, but it’s also not just a piano recording. It’s something in between. And why wasn’t that cool?
Transcribed by Sonix.ai