Computational neuroscientist and singer/songwriter Kimaya (Kimy) Lecamwasam, who also plays electric bass and guitar, says music has been a core a part of her life for so long as she will remember. She grew up in a musical family and played in bands all through highschool.
“For many of my life, writing and playing music was the clearest way I had to precise myself,” says Lecamwasam. “I used to be a extremely shy and anxious kid, and I struggled with speaking up for myself. Over time, composing and performing music became central to each how I communicated and to how I managed my very own mental health.”
Together with equipping her with invaluable skills and experiences, she credits her passion for music because the catalyst for her interest in neuroscience.
“I got to see firsthand not only the ways in which audiences reacted to music, but additionally how much value music had for musicians,” she says. “That close connection between making music and feeling well is what first pushed me to ask why music has such a strong hold on us, and eventually led me to check the science behind it.”
Lecamwasam earned a bachelor’s degree in 2021 from Wellesley College, where she studied neuroscience — specifically within the Systems and Computational Neuroscience track — and likewise music. During her first semester, she took a category in songwriting that she says made her more aware of the connections between music and emotions. While studying at Wellesley, she participated within the MIT Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program for 3 years. Working within the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences lab of Emery Brown, the Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and Computational Neuroscience, she focused totally on classifying consciousness in anesthetized patients and training brain-computer interface-enabled prosthetics using reinforcement learning.
“I still had a extremely deep love for music, which I used to be pursuing in parallel to all of my neuroscience work, but I actually desired to try to search out a solution to mix each of those things in grad school,” says Lecamwasam. Brown beneficial that she look into the graduate programs on the MIT Media Lab throughout the Program in Media Arts and Sciences (MAS), which turned out to be a really perfect fit.
“One thing I actually love about where I’m is that I get to be each an artist and a scientist,” says Lecamwasam. “That was something that was essential to me once I was picking a graduate program. I desired to be certain that I used to be going to have the option to do work that was really rigorous, validated, and essential, but additionally get to do cool, creative explorations and truly put the research that I used to be doing into practice in other ways.”
Exploring the physical, mental, and emotional impacts of music
Informed by her years of neuroscience research as an undergraduate and her passion for music, Lecamwasam focused her graduate research on harnessing the emotional potency of music into scalable, non-pharmacological mental health tools. Her master’s thesis focused on “pharmamusicology,” taking a look at how music might positively affect the physiology and psychology of those with anxiety.
The overarching theme of Lecamwasam’s research is exploring the varied impacts of music and affective computing — physically, mentally, and emotionally. Now within the third 12 months of her doctoral program within the Opera of the Future group, she is currently investigating the impact of large-scale live music and concert experiences on the mental health and well-being of each audience members and performers. She can be working to clinically validate music listening, composition, and performance as health interventions, together with psychotherapy and pharmaceutical interventions.
Her recent work, in collaboration with Professor Anna Huang’s Human-AI Resonance Lab, assesses the emotional resonance of AI-generated music in comparison with human-composed music; the aim is to discover more ethical applications of emotion-sensitive music generation and advice that preserve human creativity and agency, and can be used as health interventions. She has co-led a wellness and music workshop on the Wellbeing Summit in Bilbao, Spain, and has presented her work on the 2023 CHI conference on Human Aspects in Computing Systems in Hamburg, Germany and the 2024 Audio Mostly conference in Milan, Italy.
Lecamwasam has collaborated with organizations near and much to implement real-world applications of her research. She worked with Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute on its Well-Being Live shows and is currently partnering on a study assessing the impact of lullaby writing on perinatal health with the North Shore Lullaby Project in Massachusetts, an offshoot of Carnegie Hall’s Lullaby Project. Her important international collaboration is with an organization called Myndstream, working on projects comparing the emotional resonance of AI-generated music to human-composed music and pondering of clinical and real-world applications. She can be working on a project with the businesses PixMob and Empatica (an MIT Media Lab spinoff), centered on assessing the impact of interactive lighting and large-scale live music experiences on emotional resonance in stadium and arena settings.
Constructing community
“Kimy combines a deep love for — and complex knowledge of — music with scientific curiosity and rigor in ways in which represent the Media Lab/MAS spirit at its best,” says Professor Tod Machover, Lecamwasam’s research advisor, Media Lab faculty director, and director of the Opera of the Future group. “She has long believed that music is probably the most powerful and effective ways to create personalized interventions to assist stabilize emotional distress and promote empathy and connection. It is that this same desire to ascertain sane, protected, and sustaining environments for work and play that has led Kimy to turn out to be probably the most effective and devoted community-builders on the lab.”
Lecamwasam has participated within the SOS (Students Offering Support) program in MAS for a number of years, which assists students from quite a lot of life experiences and backgrounds in the course of the technique of applying to the Program in Media Arts and Sciences. She’s going to soon be the primary MAS peer mentor as a part of a brand new initiative through which she is going to establish and coordinate programs including a “buddy system,” pairing incoming master’s students with PhD students as a solution to help them transition into graduate student life at MIT. She can be a part of the Media Lab’s Studcom, a student-run organization that promotes, facilitates, and creates experiences meant to bring the community together.
“I believe every little thing that I even have gotten to do has been so supported by the chums I’ve made in my lab and department, in addition to across departments,” says Lecamwasam. “I believe everyone seems to be just really excited concerning the work that they do and so supportive of each other. It makes it in order that even when things are difficult or difficult, I’m motivated to do that work and be a component of this community.”
