The famous Pink Floyd lyrics emerge from sound that is muddy, yet musical: «All in all, it was just a brick in the wall.»
The famous Pink Floyd lyrics emerge from sound that is muddy, yet musical: «All in all, it was just a brick in the wall.»
But this particular recording didn’t come from the 1979 album «The Wall,» or from a Pink Floyd concert.
Instead, researchers created it from the reconstituted brainwaves of people listening to the song «Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1.»
This is the first time researchers have reconstructed a recognizable song solely from brain recordings, according to a new report published Aug. 15 in the journal PLOS Biology.
Ultimately, the research team hopes their findings will lead to more natural speech from brain-machine interfaces that aid communication with people who are «locked in» by paralysis and unable to talk.
«Right now, when we do just words, it’s robotic,» said senior researcher Dr. Robert Knight, a professor of psychology and neuroscience with the University of California, Berkeley.
Consider the computer speech associated with one of the world’s most famous locked-in patients, Stephen Hawking.
Human speech is made up of words but it also has a musicality to it, Knight said, with people adding different meanings and emotions based on musical concepts like intonation and rhythm.
«Music is universal. It probably existed in cultures before language,» Knight said. «We’d like to fuse that musical extraction signal with the word extraction signal, to make a more human interface.»
These recordings were gathered from 29 patients in 2012 and 2013. All of the patients suffered from epilepsy, and surgeons implanted the electrodes to help determine the precise brain region causing their seizures, Knight said.
«While they’re in the hospital waiting to have three seizures [to pinpoint the location of the seizures], we can do experiments like these if the patients agree,» Knight explained.
