I was on the road with my band a couple of years ago, touring through Brazil. It was full of non-stop gigs, late nights, and a ton of music. I’d been immersed in this world of sound for months — living, breathing, and sleeping music. But one morning, something wild happened.

While waking up and being in that hazy space where you’re not fully awake but not asleep either, I started hearing music in my head. It was like I had headphones on, and the track playing was a song we’d been jamming to non-stop on tour.

However, I wasn’t just hearing the song — I was controlling it!

I could isolate different parts of the melody or tweak the bass line and hear those changes in my head. I heard every single change as if the band was right there, playing in my brain. I was literally rearranging the music, experimenting with different sounds and structures, and it sounded just as real as if we were in the studio.

My mind had turned into a mixing board, and I had complete creative control. Honestly, it was one of the most surreal experiences I’ve ever had. I was composing and producing, all without lifting a finger.

Mozart composed like this all the time, but what if we could expand this to everybody? What if you could make music just by thinking about it? It’s not sci-fi anymore, it’s happening now.

Making music with your mind

A group of researchers from the University of Washington, led by Thomas Deuel, created a device that lets people control music using only their thoughts. They named it the Encephalophone, which translates from Greek to “brain sound” or “brain voice.”

How does it work?

An EEG cap picks up your brainwaves, specifically those linked to movement or sight, even if you’re not actually moving or seeing anything. By just thinking in a certain way, like imagining moving your hand or closing your eyes, you can generate different notes and even create a melody.

If the device was set to play a C note when your brain produced a certain level of alpha waves (like when you close your eyes), you could trigger that C note just by closing your eyes and focusing. Repeating this process could consistently produce the brainwave pattern that makes the device play the C note.

The researchers got 15 participants and hooked them up to the Encephalophone. Participants were given a target musical note to aim for, like a specific key on a piano (for example, a high C or a low C). For five minutes, they had to focus their thoughts in a way that would produce that note using their brainwaves.

The goal was to “hit” or match the target note as accurately as possible, and they were given multiple chances to do this within 5 minutes. Each time they correctly matched the note, it was counted as a successful “hit.”

This way, researchers could test how well participants could control the music generated by their brainwaves. In other words, they could see how effectively subjects could use their thoughts to create specific sounds.

What did they find?

To put that in perspective, if they had been guessing randomly, they would have hit the right notes only about 19% of the time. It’s a significant leap!

What’s fascinating is that those who had musical training did even better when using their visual cortex, with a correlation of around 0.58 between years of musical training and note accuracy.

The more years of music training, the more accurate you become.

How this tech changes lives

This brain-music magic is impressive in many ways.

First, it shows us that our mind isn’t just a thinking machine; it’s another musical instrument. And if you’re already trained in music, you have a head start. That’s the cool part.

The real game-changer lies in its therapeutic applications. It’s a new way for people with severe motor disabilities (e.g., ALS, people who suffered strokes, etc.) to interact with the world around them. It’s a way to give people their voices back. Here’s a video of a quadriplegic ensemble playing a piano with their minds.

Fascinating, isn’t it?

It also helps us redefine how we think about brain-computer interfaces. We’re moving beyond simple tasks like moving a cursor on a screen to something that taps into creativity and emotion — uniquely human areas. The Encephalophone is that first step toward more complex interfaces that can even help us express what’s inside us in ways we never thought possible.

It’s a future worth paying attention to.