Scientists recreate Pink Floyd's song by listening to brainwaves of people; feat to help cure patients

Researchers have achieved a groundbreaking feat by reconstructing Pink Floyd's iconic song "Another Brick in the Wall" through the analysis of individuals' brainwave patterns. This first-ever kind of research offers promising avenues for assisting patients with hindered communication due to neurological conditions. This innovation could potentially restore musicality in the speech of individuals facing debilitating neurological disorders such as stroke or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the condition which Stephen Hawking suffered with.

While previous endeavours had successfully decoded speech words from brain recordings, these attempts often lacked natural emotion.

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Professor Robert Knight, a neurologist at the University of California in Berkeley, US, said, “In general, all of these reconstruction attempts have had a robotic quality.”

He is the one who conducted the study with the postdoctoral fellow Ludovic Bellier.

“Music, by its very nature, is emotional and prosodic – it has rhythm, stress, accent and intonation. It contains a much bigger spectrum of things than limited phonemes in whatever language, that could add another dimension to an implantable speech decoder,"Knight said.

Brain methodology

Past efforts had focused on decoding brain activity from the speech motor cortex, responsible for controlling the physical articulation of speech. In contrast, the present study delved into the brain's auditory regions, where various aspects of sound are processed.

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Brain recordings were obtained from 29 patients undergoing epilepsy surgery, who were played a segment of Pink Floyd's song while their brain activity was monitored using surface electrodes.

Decoding and reconstruction

By employing artificial intelligence, the researchers decoded and subsequently reproduced the sounds and words from the brain recordings.Although the reconstructed song displayed a somewhat muffled quality. “It sounds a bit like they’re speaking underwater, but it’s our first shot at this,” said Knight.

But on the bright side, the phrase "All in all, it's just another brick in the wall" was discernible with rhythms and melody. It represented a notable achievement in this pioneering endeavour.

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“The average separation of the electrodes was about 5mm, but we had a couple of patients with 3mm [separations] and they were the best performers in terms of reconstruction,” Knight said. “Now that we know how to do this, I think if we had electrodes that were like a millimetre and a half apart, the sound quality would be much better.”

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