Brain activity used to reconstruct Pink Floyd song in scientific first

nypost.com:

PLoS Biology showed that scientists can train a computer to recreate a song based solely on the brain activity of someone listening to music.Scientists were able to reconstruct a passable cover of Pink Floyd’s 1979 song, “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 1).”“It’s a wonderful result,” co-author Robert T.

Knight, a neurologist and UC Berkeley professor of psychology at the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, said in a media release. “One of the things for me about music is it has prosody and emotional content.”This is the first time a recognizable song has been interpreted from nothing but recordings of electrical brain activity, giving hope that the new understanding of how people comprehend sound could eventually help improve devices for those with speech difficulties.Neuroscientists at the University of California, Berkeley, analyzed recordings from electrodes of 29 patients undergoing surgery for epilepsy as they listened to the Pink Floyd song.They were able to identify thoughts connected to the tone, rhythm, harmony and words of the song by looking at the electrical activity of brain regions and comparing the brain signals with the song.Pink Floyd’s lyrics, “All in all it was just a brick in the wall,” is audible in the reconstructed version of the song, with the rhythm unscathed.

They used intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) — when a surgeon records electrical activity from the brain by placing electrodes inside the skull, according to Johns Hopkins Medicine — which can only record from the surface of the brain, as close to the auditory centers as possible.“Noninvasive techniques are just not accurate enough today.