By: Jimmy Liu

Look forward to groundbreaking music cognition research coming out of McMaster's LIVELab, an $8 million research facility for the scientific study of music, dance, and multimedia. LIVELab had its grand opening on Sept. 27, and gave audiences a sneak peek of its facilities and the research that will be conducted.

LIVELab is located on the second floor of the McMaster Psychology Building, and boasts an impressive 100 seat performance hall. However, this performance hall is unlike any other – it features cutting-edge technology including virtual acoustics, motion capture, a video wall, and most importantly, the ability to measure both the audience and performer's brain responses.

“We want to study the integration between the audience and performers in a highly controlled environment,” said Carl Karichian, Lab Manager at LIVELab. “Our vision for the future is inspiring groundbreaking research that influences pedagogical decisions, health, and psychological questions in groups.”

In addition, a new music and dance studio is planned to be built at LIVELab in the memory of Catherine Carmichael, a former psychoanalyst at the McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind.

LIVELab has already completed a pilot study with CoBALT Connects, a Hamilton-based non-profit organization. Volunteers from the “Expressing Vibrancy” research project participated in studies with the lab last spring.

The community has been extremely supportive of the facility. Multiple performing artists played at the grand opening, including the McMaster Women's Choir, demonstrating the performance hall's active acoustics and motion capture systems. Members of the  Hamilton All-Star Jazz Band were also in attendance.

The windows surrounding LIVELab, crafted by architect Drew Hauser, have been arranged in such a way as to represent the notes of two songs. The Jazz Band played renditions of both songs at the opening.

“Music brings people together,” said Jillian McKenna, the bassist of the Jazz Band ensemble. “This place shows that there's a lot more to music than we take for granted.”

As a volunteer and previously a research assistant at the LIVELab, Mac student Dana Swarbrick agreed with this sentiment. As an undergraduate, she received a neuroscience award and was funded to work last summer with Laurel Trainor, the founding director.

“It was designed to look at the interaction and engagement between audience and performers,” Swarbrick said. “But it can be used for so much more.”

The performance hall contains sensors to measure sweat level on a performer's fingers, respiration belts for the audience to measure breathing, tools to measure heart rate and the nervous system, as well as the uncontrolled nervous system – the natural behavioural response of humans.

Even with this state-of-the-art technology, sometimes it's the simple things that are amazing.

“My favourite aspect is the virtual acoustics,” said Swarbrick. “It's incredible that a room can change size before your ears.”

Abhi Mukherjee

The Silhouette

Jillian O’Connor from McMaster's department of psychology, neurosciences and behaviour found that men with lower pitched, masculine voices were more desirable to women. However, women considered these men to be faithful to them for only short-term relationships. generic for viagra O’Connor does her research in the Voice Research lab. It has taken two years for her to come up with her findings.

O’Connor’s paper about how men’s voices influence women’s perception of them has allowed her to find two perceptions that women have about men: attractiveness and infidelity. Women preferred lower pitched men’s voices for short-term relationships/one night stands. Women think that men with lower pitched voices are unfaithful for a romantic relationship.

“But this is what women think of men,” said O’Connor. “Men who are really attractive with these lower pitched voices don’t really have to be faithful in the long-term. They may be more successful if they follow a shot-term mating strategy, one where they don’t commit. So this is the case where women prefer men with lower pitched voices for short-term relationships but that is only if they think that they will not be faithful.”

She stated that “[women] know when men try to lower their voices to sound more attractive, it doesn’t work. Women don’t think that it is more attractive than their natural speaking voice,” which was a result of some prior research that O’Connor and her team had done. If in everyday life men start using a deeper voice, women will not find them attractive, suggesting that men cannot fake their voices to sound attractive because women have a natural way of sensing that.

“We have other senses, so when we see someone that we are attracted to, we take a lot of things into consideration like how they look, how they sound, how they smell, it’s a big picture,” said O’Connor, who wanted to clarify that voice is not the only quality that is used to assess human attraction. O’Connor takes a special interest in human sexual behaviour or behaviours within relationships which happens to be the motivation behind her research.

”Men with lower pitched voices have higher testosterone and hence they are more likely to cheat. But we don’t know that yet and that is something we would like to test in the future,” said O’Connor.

She said that this milestone of a finding would act as a stepping stone in addressing the bigger issue, that is how women choose their mates and how voices evolved to signal underlying qualities when it comes to romantic relationships. She hopes to figure out, in the future, if a man’s voice is an honest cue to his sexual behaviour or if women are off base on their deduction about a man’s sexual behaviour.

 

By: Arnav Agarwal

 

Edward Cullen might not be the only one living forever: humans might be joining the vampires in a leap towards eternal life.

If the work of Dmitry Itskov- founder of the “Initiative 2045”, the program which proposes the reality of human immortality- follows through, the project will turn fiction into fact: machine-assisted human immortality will be an option in only 33 years. Gathering a team of leading Russian scientists to cultivate the worlds of neuroscience, android robotics and cybernetic immortality, Itskov is striving to produce a fully-functional holographic human avatar controlled by an artificial brain containing an individual’s complete consciousness.

It might seem like the idea is right out of a sci-fi movie, but there is certainly a method to the madness. An intricate plan of action from 2015 to 2045 involves the development of “a robotic form of a human body remotely controlled via BCI” (2015-2020), “an Avatar in which a human brain is transplanted at the end of one’s life” (2020-2025), “an Avatar with an artificial brain in which a human personality is transferred at the end of one’s life” (2030-2035), and finally, “a hologram-like Avatar” (2040-2045). Yes, you read correctly: the Avatar, an artificial body into which a human brain will be transplanted, could be as little as seven years away.

While the desired outcomes seem out of reach, organizations have already been hard at work in the field. DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is already working on an alternate program coincidentally also entitled “Avatar”, in an attempt to “create a brain-machine interface that will allow soldiers to control bipedal human surrogate machines remotely with their minds”, according to Popular Science Magazine’s Clay Dillow. The financial aspects of the project were addressed by Itskov as well, who reached out to the world’s richest to request assistance in financing the project while offering them their own personal immortality projects free of charge in July, according to an article released by CBC News.

But, the idea hasn’t convinced everybody. In response to the fact that medical prosthesis projects have shown that the human nervous system can manipulate prosthetics via thought, Discovery’s Alyssa Danigelis expressed that there is a ”world of difference between pursuing a brain-controlled exoskeleton to help paraplegics regain control and wanting to essentially upload a human brain into an artificial body,” as reported by CBC News.

The initiative got sceptical responses from several students within the McMaster community as well. Beatrice Preti, a second-year Bachelor of Health Sciences student, didn’t question the technology behind the innovation, but raised concerns on the initiative’s concept of eternal life as a whole: “Is life as a robot truly life? The gift we were granted with that very first breath? To have a brain control a robot, would that be living? Life is about the experience.” On the subject of immortality, she stated, “I doubt that such an experience could lead to immortality. Because immortality is the indefinite extension of life - and there is no life without the flesh and blood which teaches us who we are.”

John Sawires, a third-year B.H.Sc. student, had a different take on the issue, addressing global issues and the ever-growing challenge of seemingly limitless population growth feeding off severely-limited resources: “We're already dealing with enough problems from overpopulation. If you think about it, the problems associated with this are caused by the distribution of wealth (or lack thereof).” Sarah Sullivan, a third-year Social Sciences student, echoed John’s concerns: “The idea of being able to live forever terrifies me. We already have major overpopulation issues. What would occur if no one passed away? Would we just sterilize ourselves to keep our numbers at bay?”

Ashley Yu, a second-year B.H.Sc. student, stressed the fine line between “can” and “should”, expressing her concern over how we handle the power we hold: “The funny thing about science and technology is that it is easy to get excited or carried away with the vast amounts of possibilities that the future holds. Yes, many actions can be both plausible and feasible with the development of new technology. However, we often fail to ask ourselves if we should commit these actions just because we can. To quote Spiderman, ‘With great power comes great responsibility’”.

Rida Tul-Zahra, President of Mac Ethics Club, shared her personal views on the initiative: “I don’t think that trying to change the natural course of events by disrupting the cycle of life will lead to any good…In my opinion, the amount of money that is going to be invested in this project could be used in better ways – to help eradicate poverty and famine in some of the developing countries… Only those who will be able to afford a personal avatar will have the chance to become ‘immortal’”.

It is evident that the technological innovation required to make the project a reality stands as the most significant barrier as Itskov and his team strive to achieve a feat that has only been dreamt of before. Despite the numerous ethical, biological and social considerations, generating a machine so advanced and multi-faceted in its functionality is the primary determinant of the initiative’s success.

“I think that a ‘humanoid robot’ may be possible someday, but definitely not as soon as 2045,” says Jane Huang, a second-year Honours Biology and Psychology student. “There is so much we do not know about the brain and its functions, so how can we take the brain and incorporate it into a holographic human? How would the brain direct the avatar without a nervous system? How would the holographic body keep the brain alive without the organ systems of a normal human body?”

CBC News’ recent poll asking readers whether they would “opt for cybernetic immortality if it existed within their lifetime” revealed that a significant number of individuals would buy in to the initiative if it was successful, with over 52% of voters voting “yes”, approximately 38% voting “no”, and approximately 10% voting “I’m not sure” or providing an alternate response.

Rachel Shan, a first-year Arts and Science student, certainly relates far more to the latter 38% than the former 52%: “I am completely and utterly against such technology…All I can say is, if offered one million dollars to live forever, I would decline in a heartbeat.”

Some of the world’s leading researchers continue in pursuit of the world of cybernetic immortality, crashing technological milestones on their way to possibly generating one of the most powerful developments of the 21st century. The project’s progress has already begun to show promising signs of making ground-breaking progress and transforming the human experience. The question which continues to boggle the minds of many, however, is whether a successful initiative will transform the human experience for the better or for the worse.

Katija Bonin

The Silhouette

 

After five years of conceptual design, paired with a successful grant from the Canada Foundation for Innovation and support from McMaster University, the L.I.V.E. Performance Laboratory is under construction.

Located in McMaster’s Psychology Building, the facility will include a small concert hall and stage with seats for one hundred.

Although seemingly simplistic, it is the incorporated technology that defines this project as a Large Interactive Virtual Environment (L.I.V.E.), which will facilitate research in the areas of music and neuroscience.

The walls of the lab will be lined with a dense array of loudspeakers, which will allow users to mimic virtually any acoustic environment – “from a subway station to Carnegie Hall,” said project director Laurel Trainor.

The lab aims to fuel investigation into basic questions pertaining to the significance and universality of music in human society. “Why do people still go to concerts, when they could just listen to music at home?” said Trainor. “How do people coordinate and entertain together when playing music?”

The audience seats will be wired to measure physiological responses such as heart rate, breathing rate, skin responses, and muscle tension responses through the fingers. Thirty of the seats will be equipped with EEG sensors, enabling researchers to monitor audience neural activity. Performers will also have an EEG system, able to track four musicians at one time.

Additionally, there will be a motion capture system, tracking the movement of performers while making music and audience movements in response to music, and the back of the stage will house an array of monitors to measure the effects of visual stimuli.

The technology will allow researchers to investigate everything from how a musician’s brain copes when fellow performers make a mistake to an audience member’s physical and psychological responses to different types of music.

The concept of such a laboratory originated in McMaster’s Institute for The Music and The Mind, a multi-disciplinary institute incorporating psychology, neuroscience, engineering, music, mathematics, kinesiology and the health sciences. It is an extension of a three-tiered mandate aimed at promoting research in music cognition, music education, and music activities in the community.

It is known that music plays a role in altering mood, and music is traditionally used in many social gatherings, from parties to weddings to funerals. Research has found that “people engaging in music making or dance feel a closer social bond. This facility will enable us to test such theories,” said Trainor.

The design and technology of the facility, although originally intended to discover how music affects people, will also enable research on a variety of topics.

Already, Steven Brown and Matthew Woolhouse, researchers in the field, plan to use the space to test the psychological response to dance, while Sue Becker and Ian Bruce plan to test how well hearing aids work in realistic auditory environments, and Joe Kim, professor of Psychology at McMaster, plans on using the space to forward his research in pedagogy – the method and practice of effective teaching.

Trainor affirmed that this project is “like no other, and its potential is unlimited.”

Construction began in early January, and in the current timeframe, will be complete by Spring 2013.