May 11, 2004
Its first CD, Overload: The Sonic Intoxicant, contains tracks ranging from "chill out," meditative music to a piece that generates a feeling of motion sickness in some.
"I want to do something that messes with people's heads," said Lance Massey, a longtime composer of commercials and the creative director of NeuroPop.
"We've gone through all the data to find what kind of sounds or signal gets a specific response, and then we can merge it back into an existing piece of music or sound," said Seth Horowitz, chief technology officer of NeuroPop and an assistant research professor at Stony Brook University in New York.
Horowitz said that if he wants to get a certain response from a listener to a piece of music, he looks at what part of the brain is responsible for the desired response. Then, using his own data or other published literature, he looks to find what kind of stimulus makes that part of the brain active.