Unlocking the Power of Music for Each Unique Individual
At the heart of LUCID is an understanding that music has immense power. To unlock this power, we must first understand the connection between the music and the listener.
Why? Because we are unique. Our brains and our tastes in music are unique. Our responses to audio stimuli change depending on who we are, where we are, and what's happening inside and outside our minds.
A Musical Approach to Anxiety
Anxiety disorders are the most common mental health challenge in North America, currently affecting nearly 20% of the population. Over 60% of people use music to target stress and anxiety in their daily lives (compared to 10% who turn to meditation and 7% who turn to therapy). Listening to music can dial back the stress response by increasing parasympathetic nervous system activity and decreasing sympathetic nervous system activity. This shift implies a change in the body from responsiveness and reactivity to stress, to recovery from stress.
Our Core Technology
Affective Music Recommendation System (AMRS)
AMRS is LUCID’s proprietary, patent-pending Affective Music Recommendation System, a neural network that predicts and generates playlists to help users move towards their target mood state.
How it Works
Curation, Measurement, Delivery, Optimization
This is the closed-loop affective music recommendation system at the heart of the LUCID platform, which enables a personalized, effective, and enjoyable digital music therapy experience.
Our digital music therapy technology is designed around the iso principle, a method of mood management in which music is selected that meets the listener where they are by matching their initial mood, then gradually shifts to induce the desired mood.
We measure our users' mood in real time using proprietary psychometric and biometric tools. Our machine learning algorithms use this information to create personalized music sequences, optimized to guide the user from where they are to where they want to go.
LUCID differs from other functional music tools because we're measuring our users’ mood and personalizing their music intervention in real-time.
Commitment to Efficacy & Validation
Our highest priority is to help people effectively manage anxiety and maintain their emotional wellbeing. We are proud to work with leading researchers to conduct rigorous studies, thus setting a high bar for our technology’s performance.
Results from a recent research collaboration with Ryerson University’s SMART Lab support the use of LUCID’s technology for anxiety reduction. In individuals with moderately-severe anxiety, a single 24-minute listening session produced a 16% decrease in somatic anxiety as compared to a 5% decrease by the active comparator (p=0.03). These findings were presented at McMaster University’s 2020 NeuroMusic Conference.
We have also studied in-app data from real-world users. On average, users of LUCID’s technology experience a 54% reduction in self-reported anxiety following a single listening session.
Our Journey & Foundations
LUCID was born at Ryerson University in Toronto, where Aaron Labbe (Co-Founder and CTO) worked on his undergraduate thesis at the intersection of psychology and computational creativity. Aaron had recently recovered from a mental health crisis, primarily through his love of music. He was motivated to understand, unlock, and harness the power of music to heal, so he could share that gift with over 300 million people who suffer from mental health challenges.
With the help of the leading music and mind neuroscientist Dr. Frank Russo, clinical psychiatrist and CBT pioneer Dr. Farooq Naeem, human-centered design expert Beverly Dywan, and music AI expert and ex-Google Magenta fellow Dr. Sageev Oore, the first version of VIBE’s core technology was put into practice.
Having lived experience in mental health challenges, LUCID’s founding team wanted to ensure that our platform was safe and that users’ data was well protected. Enlisting the help of privacy and security experts, we made the commitment from day one to build LUCID around the most stringent standards, achieving ISO 27000, PIPEDA, and GDPR compliance. LUCID continues to search for and enlist experts in mental health, machine learning, music, affective computing, and privacy.