Neuroscientists have reproduced Pink Floyd‘s classic track ‘Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1’ by decoding the brain signals of a person listening to it.
As The Independent reports, a team from the University Of California, Berkeley discovered how to reconstruct the 1979 song after placing electrodes on the brains of patients and playing the music as they underwent epilepsy surgery.
Their brain activity was then analysed, which allowed the neuroscientists to reproduce the track’s rhythm and pick out recognisable lines such as “All in all it’s just another brick in the wall”.
It marks the first-ever time that a recognisable song has been reconstructed from brain recordings. Previously, scientists have used similar brain-reading techniques to try and decipher speech from thoughts.
“It’s a wonderful result,” said Robert Knight, a neurologist and UC Berkeley professor of psychology at the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, who conducted the new research.
“One of the things for me about music is it has prosody and emotional content. As this whole field of brain machine interfaces progresses, this gives you a way to add musicality to future brain implants for people who need it, someone who’s got ALS or some other disabling neurological or developmental disorder compromising speech output.”
He continued: “It gives you an ability to decode not only the linguistic content, but some of the prosodic content of speech, some of the affect. I think that’s what we’ve really begun to crack the code on.”
It is a significant step forward for brain-computer interface technology, which aims to connect humans to machines in order to treat neurological disorders or even create new abilities.
The scientists behind the research claim that advances in brain recording techniques could soon allow them to make detailed recordings using non-invasive methods such as ultra-sensitive electrodes attached to the scalp.
Ludovic Bellier, who was part of the research team, said: “Non-invasive techniques are just not accurate enough today.
“Let’s hope, for patients, that in the future we could, from just electrodes placed outside on the skull, read activity from deeper regions of the brain with a good signal quality. But we are far from there.”
The findings were published in a study titled ‘Music can be reconstructed from human auditory cortex activity using nonlinear decoding models’ – you can read it here via PLoS Biology.
Back in 2020, Elon Musk predicted that people will one day be able to stream music directly into their brains through a chip. It was reported at the time that the device was being developed by Neuralink, a tech startup co-founded by Musk in 2016.
The company was said to be working on “developing computer-brain interfaces for the explicit purpose of helping humans keep pace with advanced artificial intelligence”, per TechCrunch.
Additionally, it is said that the technology could potentially be used as a treatment for depression and addiction by “retraining” certain parts of the brain.
In other news, Roger Waters is set to debut his re-recordings of Pink Floyd’s ‘The Dark Side Of The Moon’ during a new show at the London Palladium this autumn.
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