Pink Floyd’s ‘Another Brick In The Wall’ reconstructed from person’s brain activity

nme.com:

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.