interview about the project. “You can hack the Mindflex yourself and make brain music.”

Schneider’s first mind-control musical performance took place last month at LVL1, a hackerspace in Louisville, Kentucky. LVL1’s Chris Cprek strapped on EEG sensors attached to two of the modified game devices, then reading from Schneider’s score, which is basically a collage of various texts and images.

Schneider and experimental keyboardist Robert Beatty then manipulated the twin Teletrons’ signals through vintage Moog synthesizers, serving as separate musical interpolators of Cprek’s brain waves during the weird instrument’s public debut.

Boom! Brain music.

“The curve of the pitch is basically the same for both synthesizers,” said Schneider. “But the left-brain synth is more logical and dry, while the right-brain synth is more dreamy and surreal.”

Schneider’s Teletron is the latest entry in a sparse subculture of brain-based music. Musique concrète pioneer Pierre Henry, who influenced everyone from The Beatles to Futurama, used EEG sensor-based composition to create a series called Cortical Art decades ago. American experimentalist Alvin Lucier was arguably the first to transmit alpha waves through percussion in his 1965 composition “Music for Solo Performer.”

“People have been doing mind music for awhile,” said bearded sage Schneider, who previously invented a non-Pythagorean musical scale. “I’m not sure whether it is or isn’t music, because it’s kind of chaotic.”

It took Schneider a couple months to build the Teletron, but only because of a knowledge gap that he overcame with the help of other hackers. After lusting over Mattel’s $80 Mindflex and another toy called the Star Wars‘ Science Force Trainer, Schneider scored a Mindflex for Father’s Day and quickly set about modding it with the help of a tear-down published online.

“I also found other hackers who had rewired it to shock people,” he laughed. “Once I opened it up, I realized that it was fairly simple.”

Eventually, Schneider jacked the wire from the toy’s fan, which normally controls the ball in the Mindflex game, into a vintage Moog synthesizer’s pitch input.

Thus was the Teletron born.

Ironically enough, naming his baby was a no-brainer.

“I went through all the Greek prefixes I could before finding tele,” Schneider said. “And tron just fell out of heaven, because everything should have tron attached to it.”

Although Schneider hasn’t confirmed that he’ll break out the Teletrons on The Apples in Stereo’s upcoming tour, which starts Friday in Colorado, the band’s recent pop-tronic release Travelers in Space and Time should have no trouble sonically teleporting audiences nationwide.

Eerie tracks like the digitally ethereal “Time Pilot” (below) are musical fodder for sci-fi fans and sonic modders who give bonus points to bands that nod in the direction of H.G. Wells and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

But like any serious Jedi geek, Schneider plans on furthering his telepathic training.

“The Teletron is really cool to play,” he said. “You have to be very conscious of your thoughts, and alter the music by agitating your mind.”

See Also:

• Wise Up With The Apples in Stereo’s Space and Time Math-Pop
• Q&A: Geeking Out With The Apples in Stereo’s Robert Schneider
• The Apples in Stereo: First Band to Appear Twice on The Colbert Report

Authors: Scott Thill

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