Mixing neuroscience, AI, and music to create psychological well being improvements | MIT Information
Computational neuroscientist and singer/songwriter Kimaya (Kimy) Lecamwasam, who additionally performs electrical bass and guitar, says music has been a core a part of her life for so long as she will be able to bear in mind. She grew up in a musical household and performed in bands all via highschool.
“For many of my life, writing and taking part in music was the clearest approach I needed to specific myself,” says Lecamwasam. “I used to be a extremely shy and anxious child, and I struggled with talking up for myself. Over time, composing and performing music grew to become central to each how I communicated and to how I managed my very own psychological well being.”
Together with equipping her with priceless expertise and experiences, she credit her ardour for music because the catalyst for her curiosity in neuroscience.
“I acquired to see firsthand not solely the ways in which audiences reacted to music, but additionally how a lot worth music had for musicians,” she says. “That shut connection between making music and feeling nicely is what first pushed me to ask why music has such a robust maintain on us, and ultimately led me to review the science behind it.”
Lecamwasam earned a bachelor’s diploma in 2021 from Wellesley School, the place she studied neuroscience — particularly within the Programs and Computational Neuroscience monitor — and in addition music. Throughout her first semester, she took a category in songwriting that she says made her extra conscious of the connections between music and feelings. Whereas learning at Wellesley, she participated within the MIT Undergraduate Analysis Alternatives Program for 3 years. Working within the Division of Mind and Cognitive Sciences lab of Emery Brown, the Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and Computational Neuroscience, she centered totally on classifying consciousness in anesthetized sufferers and coaching brain-computer interface-enabled prosthetics utilizing reinforcement studying.
“I nonetheless had a extremely deep love for music, which I used to be pursuing in parallel to all of my neuroscience work, however I actually wished to attempt to discover a approach to mix each of these issues in grad faculty,” says Lecamwasam. Brown really useful that she look into the graduate applications on the MIT Media Lab inside the Program in Media Arts and Sciences (MAS), which turned out to be an excellent match.
“One factor I actually love about the place I’m is that I get to be each an artist and a scientist,” says Lecamwasam. “That was one thing that was necessary to me after I was selecting a graduate program. I wished to make it possible for I used to be going to have the ability to do work that was actually rigorous, validated, and necessary, but additionally get to do cool, artistic explorations and truly put the analysis that I used to be doing into observe in numerous methods.”
Exploring the bodily, psychological, and emotional impacts of music
Knowledgeable by her years of neuroscience analysis as an undergraduate and her ardour for music, Lecamwasam centered her graduate analysis on harnessing the emotional efficiency of music into scalable, non-pharmacological psychological well being instruments. Her grasp’s thesis centered on “pharmamusicology,” taking a look at how music may positively have an effect on the physiology and psychology of these with nervousness.
The overarching theme of Lecamwasam’s analysis is exploring the varied impacts of music and affective computing — bodily, mentally, and emotionally. Now within the third yr of her doctoral program within the Opera of the Future group, she is at the moment investigating the influence of large-scale dwell music and live performance experiences on the psychological well being and well-being of each viewers members and performers. She can also be working to clinically validate music listening, composition, and efficiency as well being interventions, together with psychotherapy and pharmaceutical interventions.
Her latest work, in collaboration with Professor Anna Huang’s Human-AI Resonance Lab, assesses the emotional resonance of AI-generated music in comparison with human-composed music; the purpose is to establish extra moral purposes of emotion-sensitive music technology and advice that protect human creativity and company, and can be used as well being interventions. She has co-led a wellness and music workshop on the Wellbeing Summit in Bilbao, Spain, and has introduced her work on the 2023 CHI convention on Human Elements in Computing Programs in Hamburg, Germany and the 2024 Audio Principally convention in Milan, Italy.
Lecamwasam has collaborated with organizations close to and much to implement real-world purposes of her analysis. She labored with Carnegie Corridor’s Weill Music Institute on its Nicely-Being Live shows and is at the moment partnering on a research assessing the influence of lullaby writing on perinatal well being with the North Shore Lullaby Undertaking in Massachusetts, an offshoot of Carnegie Corridor’s Lullaby Undertaking. Her most important worldwide collaboration is with an organization known as Myndstream, engaged on initiatives evaluating the emotional resonance of AI-generated music to human-composed music and pondering of medical and real-world purposes. She can also be engaged on a undertaking with the businesses PixMob and Empatica (an MIT Media Lab spinoff), centered on assessing the influence of interactive lighting and large-scale dwell music experiences on emotional resonance in stadium and area settings.
Constructing group
“Kimy combines a deep love for — and complicated data of — music with scientific curiosity and rigor in ways in which characterize the Media Lab/MAS spirit at its finest,” says Professor Tod Machover, Lecamwasam’s analysis advisor, Media Lab school director, and director of the Opera of the Future group. “She has lengthy believed that music is without doubt one of the strongest and efficient methods to create personalised interventions to assist stabilize emotional misery and promote empathy and connection. It’s this identical need to determine sane, protected, and sustaining environments for work and play that has led Kimy to turn out to be one of the efficient and devoted community-builders on the lab.”
Lecamwasam has participated within the SOS (College students Providing Help) program in MAS for just a few years, which assists college students from a wide range of life experiences and backgrounds throughout the means of making use of to the Program in Media Arts and Sciences. She’s going to quickly be the primary MAS peer mentor as a part of a brand new initiative via which she’s going to set up and coordinate applications together with a “buddy system,” pairing incoming grasp’s college students with PhD college students as a approach to assist them transition into graduate scholar life at MIT. She can also be a part of the Media Lab’s Studcom, a student-run group that promotes, facilitates, and creates experiences meant to deliver the group collectively.
“I feel every little thing that I’ve gotten to do has been so supported by the chums I’ve made in my lab and division, in addition to throughout departments,” says Lecamwasam. “I feel everyone seems to be simply actually excited in regards to the work that they do and so supportive of each other. It makes it in order that even when issues are difficult or tough, I’m motivated to do that work and be part of this group.”
