Brain damaged violinist makes music for first time in 27 years with mind-reading technology

Violinist Rosemary Johnson has spent the last 27 years thinking she would never make music again, following a devastating car crash. A member of the Welsh National Opera Orchestra, she was destined to become a world-class musician before her road accident in 1988, which left her in a coma for seven months.

Miss Johnson suffered a devastating head injury, robbing her of speech and movement. The most she could do was pick out a few chords on the piano with the help of her mother Mary. But now, thanks to cutting-edge technology, she is creating music again, using just the power of her mind. In an extraordinary 10-year project led by the Plymouth University and the Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability in London, her brain has been wired up to a computer using Brain Computer Music Interfacing software. By focusing on different coloured lights on a computer screen, she can select notes and phrases to be played and alter a composition as it is performed by live musicians. The intensity of her mental focus can even change the volume and speed of the piece.

“It was really very moving. The first time we tried with Rosemary we were in tears. We could feel the joy coming from her at being able to make music.” said Professor Eduardo Miranda, Composer and Director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Music Research at Plymouth University. The great achievement of this project is that it is possible to perform music without being able to actually move. She is essentially controlling another musician to play it for her. Three other disabled patients who live at the hospital have also been trained to use the technology, and have been working alongside four able-bodied musicians from the Bergersen String quartet who play the music in real time as it is selected.

They are called The Paramusical Ensemble, and they have already recorded a piece of music entitled Activating Memory which will be heard for the first time at the Peninsula Arts Contemporary Music Festival in Plymouth later this month. Miss Johnson’s mother Mary, 80, of Hounslow, West London said the project had given her daughter new hope.