Brain.fm brings musical AI to Rio Olympics’ training

Music is extremely powerful. We all accept that it can affect our emotions and the way we feel, but science is showing that it has more direct effects on the brain as well, particularly when it is paired with wearables devices.

Brain.fm is a freemium auditory program designed to help people either focus, relax or sleep using AI-generated music. It’s users include students, insomniacs and athletes. Heavily steeped in scientific research, its creators have a history in making niche audio brainwave software for psychologists and researchers and their work includes patents on auditory brainwave stimulation and memory.

I spoke to Brain.fm co-founder Adam Hewett, client and Olympic athlete Robby Smith, and Junaid Kalmadi, who looks after business development for Brain.fm. Smith is using Brain.fm as part of his preparations for the 2016 Rio Olympics.

How does Brain.fm work?

Hewett explained their work is based on a number of audio principles that are combined using AI:

 “First, if you’re listening via earbuds or headphones, you’ll notice right off the bat that the sounds seem as if they are moving around your head. The sounds will start out on the side but will move to where they seem as if they are coming from the front, about a book’s length or screen’s length away. This helps focus you on the task in front of you. In the case of relaxation or sleep, the sounds will seems as if they are swirling all about you, and this can simulate the way it feels to sway in a hammock or rock in a cradle, because the brain picks up balancing cues from the ears. It’s the first thing you’ll notice when you use Brain.fm.

Next, we employ two little known auditory principles called Dynamic Attending Theory and ‘entrainment,’ where rhythms appear to have a more direct effect on the brain. You’ll notice that the rhythm is very consistent and that you quickly fall into a mental rhythm yourself – it’s easy to get into the “zone” using Brain.fm, and lose track of time as you focus on your work. But it’s not just the rhythms that you hear that matter: there are also very rapid, very precise rhythms embedded into the sound. You probably won’t even notice them, but if you try you may hear tiny flutters in the sound here and there. These modulations produce a direct effect on the brain that we can examine and confirm using EEG and MRI tests.

The AI is necessary because we wanted the music to be good! And good music is extremely complex to compose. In order to make these principles work for us, we had to find a way to synchronize every single note and beat to the goal of the session, with millisecond precision. It started out as an algorithm, but it rapidly became apparent that we needed something smart – something that could actually compose the music.”

Even athletes need to learn to focus and relax

Robby Smith, the U.S. Olympic wrestling team captain, is a Brain.Fm client. He explained how it’s been helpful in relaxation and sleep inducement:

“I listen to Focus and Relaxation when I’m lifting weights – those sessions help me focus and have the right intensity I need at that moment in time. As an athlete, the closer you get to a tournament the mind begins to work non-stop and it’s hard to shut it down. So in bed trying to fall asleep, my mind thinks about every single scenario and I’m constantly dreaming about wrestling with little restful sleep. Ever since I started using the sleep option in brain.fm, I’ve been completely off melatonin and sleep aids. It’s been my go-to tool to fall asleep since I began few months ago.

For meditation, I combine brain.fm with breath work or simply relax when I have a short 20 to 30 minute window. I prioritize letting my body relax every day, so I usually lay on my back, focus on my breathing and listen to brain.fm’s relax or meditation sessions2

He even has a particular routine in preparation for the Olympics:

“I listen to the focus sessions before practice to help me get ‘in the zone,’ and then after practice, I can come to my room and use the Relaxation sessions to focus on my breath and calm myself down, because I don’t need to be at that high intensity level all the time. I also use the sleep sessions to help myself fall asleep at night, which is very important for recovery from practice each day.”

While Brain.fm’s program is validated by science, I was curious to learn how about how the team was able to make their idea financially viable. We often hear that marketing software in a crowded market place. Kalmadi explained:

“In November 2015, we did a soft launch with Brain.fm on three early adopter communities: AppSumo, Product Hunt and Hacker News. With AppSumo, we sold $300k of Brain.fm product in a week and acquired over 11,300 customers. With Product Hunt, we hit the top 50 most up-voted product of over 20,000 products on the internet. With Hacker News, we were were up-voted #1 for 24 hours. These three launch moments generated enough word-of-mouth buzz enabling us to grow to $45k in monthly revenue.”

According to Kalmadi, the biggest challenge for Brain.fm has been making the tangible benefits of their product apparent in as shorter period of time as possible:

“In the earlier versions of Brain.fm it required weeks or even months of consistent listening in order to notice the differences. After 15 months of tinkering, we’ve now advanced the core technology to the point where users experience the benefits of deeper focus, reduced stress and restful sleep in the first 10-15 minutes of listening.”

Does it work for us mere mortals?

You can try Brain.fm for free a number of times before payment is required. Most writers are terrible procrastinators and I’ve only tried it once but was rudely interrupted by my cat walking across the trackpad of my laptop thus stopping the music. I’ll definitely be giving it another go…when my cat’s asleep.

Brain.fm will be launched in app form in the near future and it’s seems highly applicable with a range of connected devices to aid and monitor sleep and manage focus. The developers are currently working with working with neuroscientists at Wesleyan University to release a landmark study on Brain.fm’s results on the brain which will hopefully lead to future collaborations and opportunities.

Britney Spears says 'oops!' in a pop song again so all is well

"Oops!" exclaims Britney Spears in her latest track off her forthcoming album, Glory. Yep, Britney's back, bitch, and she is definitely not that innocent. 

"Clumsy" is pure fun — a bouncing pop gem that follows Britney on the prowl. "Call me a fool, call me a saint, but don't call it a date," instructs Spears. You had better behave (except on the dance floor, where Brit Brit thinks you should really go nuts). 

Obama just dropped his summer playlist and can he please not leave us

Barack Obama knows we're heartbroken about him leaving the White House, so he's compensating for it by leaving a few legacies behind.

Our super cool dad of a president just dropped not one but two summer playlists on Twitter – one for getting pumped up during the day and one for rocking out at night. 

That's one more playlist than he released last summer.

 Follow

President Obama 

✔@POTUS

Been waiting to drop this: summer playlist, the encore. What's everybody listening to?

7:31 PM - 11 Aug 2016

 
•  32,35632,356 Retweets
 
•  57,20157,201 likes

His daytime summer playlist features a wide spread of genres, and it includes a variety of artists including Prince, Sara Bareilles, Jay Z and Beach Boys. The White House's official Spotify account wasted no time in compiling the president's daytime hits into a playlist.

IMAGE: POTUS/TWITTER

At night, Obama rocks out to musicians including Mary J. Blige, Miles Davis, Chance the Rapper and Billie Holiday. The evening tracks were also put together on Spotify.

IMAGE: POTUS/TWITTER

Hopefully Obama will drop his own album next.

Sia to headline Ohio concert in support of abortion access

Sia is set to headline a free pro-choice concert in Ohio, which is one of several states with an anti-abortion "trigger law" that would ban abortions if Roe v. Wade is overturned. 

The Sept. 10 concert —  which will be held at Cleveland State University's Wolstein Center — is being sponsored by All Access Coalition, an organization that promotes abortion rights. 

Hosted by Comedy Central star Jessica Williams, Saturday Night Live and Ghostbusterscomedian Leslie Jones will also be there, along with Mexican singer Natalia Lafourcade.

"We all need to stand together and be a part of creating the future we hope to see," Sia said in a statement. "There is so much support out there for an inclusive, equitable society that it's time we showed our collective power."

Similar concerts will be held in cities across the country including Miami, Chicago, Atlanta and Philadelphia.

There's another version of Jake Owen's 'American Love' you haven't heard

Jake Owen originally had a different kind of American Love in mind. 

After he and his wife divorced after three years and his father was diagnosed with cancer, the Florida-born country singer known for cheery tracks like "Barefoot Blue Jean Night" and "Beachin'" found himself putting together a far more introspective thing. 

"I found myself on a much more somber note, on the sadder side of things," he told Mashable of the original batch of songs he crafted for his followup to 2013'sDays of Gold. 

But listening to American Love in its final form is anything but sad. Rather, it's filled with stories about the honeymoon phase of falling in love ("American Love"), spontaneous roadtrips ("VW Van") and good vibes and good beer ("Good Company"). There are, of course, plenty of more sobering moments too, like "You Ain't Going," about his inability to get over an ex, and on the downtempo "When You Love Someone," but overall it's a decidedly upbeat.

So, what happened? Owen got a "really honest" response from his label that boiled down to this: Stick to what you're good at. 

"I just kind of had to look at myself in the mirror and realize that this isn't even what brought me to the table," he said. "This isn't what makes me happy as a person either."

So he scrapped a lot of it, went back to the drawing board and "made some of the more happy, fun, good-vibes sort of music that I'm used to making." 

"I'm glad I did, too. It turned out exactly how I wanted it to," he said. "That's what music's for, is healing.  I'm thankful that I have it to help me with, maybe not so much sometimes facing the things I'm dealing with but sometimes masking them and giving me an escape." 

Not all of his first draft was cut, either. Owen says "American Love," "After Midnight" and "Everybody Dies Young" were all from his first batch. But altogether, there were more songs "along the line" of "When You Love Someone," an anguished piano ballad about a broken love. 

That song is one of the three songs on American Love that Owen produced, marking his first time playing producer after 10 years of releasing albums. He also produced the sun-drenched "Good Company" and the rock n roll-inspired "VW Van." 

And while American Love is most definitely a country album, it's also brewed with elements of jazz, R&B and rock. Album opener "American Love" has elements of all of them in one. It's all a result of the fact that, after 10 years making music, Owen's become more comfortable borrowing from other genres. 

"Over the years i've worked hard to kind of hone in on what it is my sound, my brand of music is," he said. "And over the years I've been able to sneak in some different influences and add a little different flavor." 

It all adds up to a delightful and surprising listen, and a satisfying one for fans who have been listening since 2006's Startin' With Me. But will we ever hear his first take on American Love? 

Pandora will now recommend nearby concerts, thanks to Ticketfly

Spotify late last year turned its recommendation engine to concerts, suggesting nearby shows based on the listening habits of its users. Today, Pandora announced a similar move, aided by Ticketfly, which Pandora acquired last year. Now, the two are working together to bring personalized concert suggestions to Pandora users, also based on listening behavior.

When an artist creates an event on Ticketfly, Pandora listeners who like the artist will receive a push notification that the artist has just announced a nearby show. If the Pandora user taps on the push notification, they’ll be taken directly to Ticketfly through an in-app browser where they can purchase concert tickets.

If the event is announced, but tickets aren’t yet on sale, listeners can instead set a reminder after clicking through on the push notification. This will allow them to receive a second notification when tickets become available.

Push notifications for mobile devices will be arriving soon, says Ticketfly, but feed alerts in Pandora’s app are already live. Here, the feed will feature event announcements and on-sale notifications.

In addition, personalized live event email digests will also be sent out to users starting later this year. These emails may include special offers that encourage listeners to buy the tickets, notes Ticketfly.

The news of the further integration between the two services follows Pandora’s acquisition of Ticketfly for $450 million last year – a move aimed at helping connect Pandora listeners to live events in their local area. At the time of the deal, it was unclear how tightly integrated the two products would become.

With this new move, Ticketfly’s 1,600 clients can reach a targeted subset of Pandora’s nearly 80 million monthly active users, the company says. Meanwhile, all of Ticketfly’s service fees will be included in Pandora’s GAAP revenue 100%. By connecting the two services via Pandora’s widely used app, the combined companies should be able to boost their bottom line.

“Pandora is the most-used app in the world—on average, listeners spend more than 24 hours on Pandora every month, logging around 1.83 billion monthly listening hours in aggregate,” notes Caren Park, Ticketfly’s Director of Product in an announcement.

“That means more eyes and ears than ever on your events, right when they’re announced and right when they go on sale. And this is just the beginning. In the coming months, Pandora’s live event marketing platform will be built out even further to help you market your events and build your brand, meaning you’ll sell out more shows with less headaches,” Park adds.

Helping alert users to nearby shows is something a number of companies today are tackling, including not only Spotify, whose concerts feature was built with Songkick’s help, but also Songkick itself, as well as Bandsintown, Reverbnation, Jambase, Eventful, and others.

Apple Music will no longer add DRM to songs you upload to the cloud

Good news Apple Music subscribers: Apple is updating the way its “match” feature works.

Not only is the matching algorithm now better (matching from audio fingerprints instead of metadata), tracks you upload to iTunes from Apple Music will no longer have DRM. 

In other words, it will now work exactly the same way as the existing iTunes Match feature.

When Apple Music debuted last year, one of the benefits of the service was that any music already in your iTunes library that you didn’t buy from Apple could be uploaded to the cloud for access later. 

Apple would simply match the tracks it could in its library (Amazon and Google both offer similar services). The problem – and what made Apple Music’s matching different from iTunes Match – was that it would attach DRM to any of those uploads. 

That might be OK if you stay an Apple Music subscriber forever. (Actually, no, I take that back. It’s never OK to put DRM on non-DRM content that you upload to the cloud.) But it presents problems if you cancel the service because any tracks you download back to your computer now have DRM on them. 

No more. 

As The Loop explains: 

This is, in fact, the same version of iTunes Match that iTunes users could pay for as a separate subscription since Apple began offering it years ago. I am one of those users. However, all subscribers to Apple Music will get the new version of iTunes Match at no extra cost. This update also means that all Matched songs will download DRM-free. 

This also means that if you’re someone like me — who both pays for iTunes Match (which is $25 a year) and subscribes to Apple Music — you can go ahead and dump that extra iTunes Match subscription. 

Like The Loop's Jim Dalrymple, I probably won’t be getting rid of my iTunes Match subscription immediately, just to be safe, but it's great that in the future dual users won’t have to pay that $25 a year. 

It’s also great that Apple is making the match experience in Apple Music a first-class citizen. 

One reason I use Apple Music over Spotify is the fact that all of my local music is accessible too. (I subscribe to both services, along with Tidal and YouTube Red, and I pay for Amazon Prime.) It’s awesome to be able to pull up an old playlist I made years ago or limited-edition versions of albums that aren’t in modern streaming catalogs. 

Now, Apple Music subscribers can take advantage of all that stuff without having their own files encumbered in DRM. 

Apple says they are rolling out the new match to 1 to 2 percent of Apple Music subscribers every day. You’ll know you have the new system when your matched files say “Matched” in the iCloud status column in iTunes on your Mac or PC. 

New Apple patent could block iPhone recording at concerts

Taking videos at concerts is already annoying, but if a certain Apple patent ever makes its way into a product, it also could be impossible.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) granted Apple a patent — originally filed in 2011 — for a technology that would disable phones' cameras at certain public events by tracking and interpreting infrared signals.

The patent reads: "An infrared emitter can be located in areas where picture or video capture is prohibited, and the emitter can generate infrared signals with encoded data that includes commands to disable the recording functions of devices. An electronic device can then receive the infrared signals, decode the data and temporarily disable the device’s recording function based on the command." 

IMAGE: UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE

There's no telling whether Apple has any plans to actually use this technology. It's entirely possible that the tech giant has no plans to develop the camera blocker at all, but rather obtained the patent as a way to prevent anyone else from developing it. (An Apple representative would not comment on whether the company had plans to deploy the technology.)

It's also an open question that, if Apple were to implement such a technology, what the guidelines and restrictions would be in using it. Could, say, private security or even law enforcement take advantage of it to shut down recording in a specific area? The tech would have obvious legal implications if so.

Given its history with protecting iPhone users' freedom and privacy, it would be very un-Apple like of the company to implement such a tech. That is, unless Apple execs are as annoyed with mid-concert Snapchats as Alicia Keys is. 

Apple rejects Spotify's app update, Spotify calls approval process a 'weapon'

Apple has rejected an update to Spotify's iOS iPhone app, and Spotify is crying foul. 

In a letter sent to Apple's top lawyer on June 26 and obtained by Recode, Spotify general counsel Horacio Gutierrez said that Apple cited "business model rules" for turning down an update to its iOS app. But according to the site, Gutierrez considers the move anti-competitive, and used his letter to suggest that Apple was using its approval process to hurt competitors of Apple Music.

"This latest episode raises serious concerns under both U.S. and EU competition law," he wrote, according to Recode. "It continues a troubling pattern of behavior by Apple to exclude and diminish the competitiveness of Spotify on iOS and as a rival to Apple Music, particularly when seen against the backdrop of Apple’s previous anticompetitive conduct aimed at Spotify … we cannot stand by as Apple uses the App Store approval process as a weapon to harm competitors."

Apple's reason for rejecting the update seemed to stem from a promotion whereby new subscribers could sign up for Spotify for $0.99  if they signed up on Spotify's website. According to Recode, Spotify was attempting to promote the campaign inside the app when Apple threatened to remove the app from its store. 

Apps have been barred from sending users to sign-up for services outside of an app since 2011. If a subscription service wants to charge users inside its app, it must use the iTunes billing service. Apple takes a 30 percent cut of in-app purchases.

While the streaming service complied and stopped promoting the campaign inside the app, it turned off its App Store billing option, according to Recode. 

In a statement on Thursday, Jake Ward, president and CEO of the Application Developers Alliance, said Apple was "deliberately creating friction." 

“For the app marketplace to continue to thrive, users to have choices, and developers to have a competitive opportunity, platforms must give publishers clear and consistent guidelines," he wrote. "Platforms deliberately creating friction and obstacles between publishers and users is bad for business and ultimately hurts consumers.”

A representative for Apple did not respond to Mashable's request for comment. Spotify declined to comment on the record.

Apple fires back at Spotify over app update dispute

Apple has fired back after Spotify took the company to task for rejecting an app update.

In a letter sent by Apple's top lawyer, the Cupertino company accuses the music streaming platform of asking for special treatment while blasting it for "rumors and half-truths."

In the letter, first reported by BuzzFeed, Apple's General Counsel Bruce Sewell notes that Spotify has "benefited enormously" from Apple's App Store and asks the company to update its app to bring it in line with the App Store's developer guidelines.

The spat stems from a rejected App Store update to the Spotify app. Spotify apparently offered a promotion to users who signed up for the service on its website rather than within the app, which would require the music streaming company to share some of the revenue with Apple. 

View image on Twitter

 Follow

jonathan prince @jonathanmprince

This is what @Apple wants you to believe violates their rules. No offer, no purchase, no link to anywhere at all.

12:52 AM - 2 Jul 2016

 
•  111111 Retweets
 
•  103103 likes

In a letter sent earlier in the week, Spotify's top lawyer called Apple's behavior "anticompetitive" and said the company "uses the App Store approval process as a weapon to harm competitors."

But Apple fired back Friday accusing the company of unfairly asking for special treatment. "Our investment in the App Store is not trivial — any great retailer will tell you there is an incredible amount of effort that goes into maintaining their store," Sewell writes.

"However, if a customer chooses to sign up for a digital product outside of the App Store the developer does not pay us anything, and their content will still work inside of Apple devices. To imply that Spotify should not have to pay to avail itself of the benefits of Apple's hard work, just as every other developer does, would give you a tremendous advantage over other developers. It's simply unfair and unreasonable."

"We understand you want special treatment and protections from competition, but we simply will not do that because we firmly adhere to the principle of treating all developers fairly and equally."

Sewell also points out that Apple recently changed its rules for app subscriptions so that companies like Spotify can keep more revenue from app subscriptions after the first year. 

What happens next is unclear. It would seem that one of the companies would have to budge.

While Sewell doesn't go as far to say that Apple would remove the app from its store, he says implies that the app won't be approved for an update until Spotify falls in line.