Working with Rosemary: Locked-in Syndrome and Music Making

Rosemary Johnson was a former Welsh National Opera violinist who was paralysed in a car crash.

Across a few years, I worked with Rosemary on a number of projects that developed our technology and supported her interest in how the tools we were developing could provide her with an outlet for music making, something that she could no longer do since her accident.

Starting in collaboration with the University of Essex’s BCI Research Group and the Royal Hospital for Neuro-disabilites (RHN), London I designed and developed a brain controlled system for Rosemary. The system allowed her to play simple melodies along with backing music. Wearing a brain cap, she was able to choose different styles of backing music and play melodies of different instruments.

This success of this first project (and the validation of the SSVEP technique as a means of real-time brain-computer control) really paved the way for my subsequent work in brain-computer music interfacing. I worked with Rosie again - she was a member of the ParaMusical Ensemble, and I developed a system for her that was used in a short documentary, and she was featured in a BBC news article.

After our first session with Rosie, she contacted us (using her speller board and therapist) via email to say:

“Thankyou, it felt great to be in control again”.

That was an incredible message to receive and it really validated the path I had started to take around developing tools for those with limited or no movement.

I even kept a recording of her playing the first controlled musical system I built for her:

Photo of Rosie playing the system: