The operating principle: try anything, try everything, and report back honestly — including the failures. Most people in this space theorize. The point of this page is that the experiments actually got run, usually on me, and the negative results are here alongside the positive ones.

🌌 Aurora — closed-loop neurofeedback you can open in a browser

→ Try the live demo (demo mode works without a headset)

Two channels of EEG drive generative music and visuals in a closed loop. What's actually under the hood:

• Alpha (8–12 Hz) reward for the relax mode, beta for focus — with a calibration step so the target is your baseline, not a stock template.
• Peak alpha frequency drives radial speed; the aperiodic χ exponent drives high-frequency turbulence. Using the 1/f slope as a live control signal is a more defensible arousal marker than raw band power, and almost nothing on the consumer market does it.
• EMG artifact gating that freezes the feedback when it detects muscle noise, instead of cheerfully rendering garbage. This is the honest engineering choice and the expensive one.
• Posterior vigilance / drowsiness / on-task proxies at Pz and approximately P4–O2, each independently artifact-gated.
• A two-channel divergence/curl proxy that expands and contracts the harmonic field.
• Audio that entrains rather than scores you — broadband rhythm maps to pitch across 40–3200 Hz, cadence, and stereo orbit; alertness and entropy morph the tuning from gently tense to consonant. No points, no spaceship, no bar to game.
• A small RL loop that tests bounded pitch/light combinations, credits recent action history, and stores learned scores locally — never raw EEG.

And the disclaimer sits right in the interface: these are personal trends, not a detector of thoughts. That sentence is the difference between an instrument and a wellness product.

→ Remote Music Neurofeedback Session Report — a real session, run remotely, written up for Resolution Hacks at Harvard. Collaboration with Eduardo Baena at Northeastern through mindfulmakers.xyz, a Boston community running one-day hackathons on mindfulness and technology.

🌊 Earlier science — oceans, atmospheres, planets

The part of the CV that gets buried, and shouldn't:

• 🌊 Oceanography paper
• 🪐 Computational Astrobiology Summer School (Hawaii) · ACDC (Norway) · Princeton Envision · Future Forum
• 🌡️ Socialized inside an Atmospheric Science department; climate science, planetary atmospheres, astronomy

This isn't a detour from the current work — it's the origin of the toolkit. Turbulence, spectra, multiscale coupling, boundary layers, and signal-versus-noise are earth-science instincts applied to a nervous system. Someone who learned to think about fields and spectra on oceans and atmospheres will reach for the aperiodic exponent instead of a band-power bar graph. That's exactly what happened.