Integrating EEG osc signal with ableton

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1

Hi beautiful people of showsync,

I have EEG signal that is processed using openvibe, which outputs the signal as osc. Using the livegrabber I was able to receive the signal in ableton (see pic). However, now I’m stuck on how I can make use of this signal. I want to convert it into midi to control vst parameters in ableton. Can anyone give me pointers?

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Thanks!

2

Hi Harin,

You can use the ParamGrabber plugin in reverse! To do this you can place the ParamGrabber plugin right of the VST or effect you want to control, then select the parameter and type in an address.
Then, you can send OSC messages from openvibe to this address and it will control the parameter. GrabberReceiver should still be somewhere in the Ableton project .

*Note that for some third party VST’s the learn function does not work (yet), if you don’t see the parameter in the list you would like to control, you can first automate the parameter, it should then become ‘visible’ for ParamGrabber.

Hope this helps!

Kind greetings,
Miro

1 Like
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Thanks Miro, I’ll try that out!

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Hi Miro,
I tired it and it works like magic! I wanted to ask you few other things (if you don’t mind) that I’m a little confused about regarding how to treat the signal.

The raw signal from the EEG is irregular and has no aboslute minimum and maximum (ranging from around -150 to +150). When I try to control the parameters using this raw signal, it obviously just makes the VST knobs either 0 or 100%. I thought that having the Norm (guessing this is normalization?) on that might fix the issue but it’s still the same and I don’t see much of the mid values and would idealy want to have somewhat a smooth ramp that alters the knobs. Is there a way you can think of that I can achieve this? Would it be possible to modify the max patch to scale the signal first and then send that to Ableton? If so, where would I do this?

Would really appreciate if you could give me pointers.
Thanks!
Harin

5

Hi Harin,

In this reply there is a version of ParamGrabber in which one can change the scaling of the input values by setting a minimum and a maximum. For instance around -150 min and +150 max in your case.

Hope this helps!
If this is indeed useful we will consider to implement it in the next version :slight_smile:

ParamGrabber.amxd (363.3 KB)

Kind greetings,
Miro