– Researchers are exploring brain implants to help restore speech and possibly singing abilities in individuals who’ve lost them.
– Scientists have shown that the brain’s electrical activity can be decoded to reconstruct music.
– A study involved 29 participants with electrodes on their brain surfaces, monitoring them while they listened to Pink Floyd’s 1979 song “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1.”
– The electrodes recorded brain activity related to musical elements like tone, rhythm, harmony, and lyrics.
– Using machine learning, the researchers were able to reconstruct a distorted version of the audio the participants were hearing.
– The study was published in PLOS Biology.
– Historically, neuroscientists have tried to decode visual, auditory, and cognitive experiences from brain activity.
– In 2012, a team managed to reconstruct audio recordings of words participants heard using implanted electrodes.
– Other researchers have reproduced images participants recently saw or imagined using similar techniques.
– The PLOS Biology paper suggests that music can also be synthesized from brain activity.
– Shailee Jain, a neuroscientist not involved in the study, highlighted the significance of these findings in understanding sound processing in the brain
– The researchers used an AI model to convert brain activity data into musical sound, training it on data from electrodes attached to participants listening to the Pink Floyd song during surgery.
– The song was chosen for its complex layers, making it interesting for analysis. Additionally, the researchers admitted to being fans of Pink Floyd.
– The AI model analyzed the brain’s response to the song’s various acoustic components, such as pitch, rhythm, and tone.
– Another AI model reassembled the analyzed data to estimate the sounds the patients heard, resulting in a roughly intact melody with slightly distorted lyrics.
– The study also identified specific brain regions responsible for processing different musical features of the song.
Neuroscientists Re-create Pink Floyd Song from Listeners’ Brain Activity
