BrainRap deconstructs both phonetic features and the literal meaning of words and phrases to propose a series of related words and sentences, either directly applicable to the artist’s narrative or which could take it in different directions. The artist can incorporate its suggestions into their flow in small parts or whole sentences; as inspiration; or can ignore them completely. BrainRap listens and adapts its suggestions in realtime to whatever creative choice the artist makes.

The BrainRap team has mapped vocabulary to emotional states and their corresponding areas of the cerebral cortex to create a framework of ‘neurosentiment’ data which informs these suggestions. Using an EEG headset made by BrainBit, brainwave data can be combined with this framework to infer an artist’s mental state while in flow, which in turn, can be used for more accurate word and phrase generation. BrainRap emerged from an MIT hackathon, where founder Micah Brown met music and machine-learning polymath, founder of generative music start-up Dadabots, CJ Carr.

Micah and CJ combined their experience and technical expertise with a passion for freestyling to create the BrainRap hack. On winning the hackathon the pair embarked on a year of R&D to create BrainRap’s proprietary prototype and co-founded the start-up.

Isabel Garvey, Managing Director, Abbey Road Studios, explains the selection of BrainRap: “Abbey Road Studios is at the heart of the music making creative process, therefore in our quest for cutting edge innovation we have always naturally been drawn to technologies that enhance, enable and assist human creativity. With BrainRap, we are excited to take this exploration to the next level with assistive writing and freestyling tools that demonstrate how technology can allow lyrical expression to thrive.”

Karim Fanous, Innovation Manager, Abbey Road Red says: “We are going to explore the next era of songwriting
together with the BrainRap team, a natural evolution of innovation in music tech that tracks from the impact of the synthesizer to the future of AI assisted writing, performance and production. This is also the first pragmatic use of EEG data we have seen in the music space and we are excited to help BrainRap deploy it. There’s a big fun factor here too, I wouldn’t have thought I would be freestyling in a board meeting, but with BrainRap, I did exactly that.”

Micah Brown, Founder of BrainRap explains his ambitions: “BrainRap and its underlying neurosentiment technology represents the future of the mental web - the ability to harness consciousness to enhance human computer interaction in digital environments - in this case, music creation.”

CJ Carr, Co-founder of BrainRap adds: “People fear AI automation will destroy musicianship. Yet music is a way of communicating, a way of being. You can't automate that. The radical thing is to build AI tools that improve skill without becoming a crutch. Let's do this for freestyling. This is BrainRap.”

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