Sound clip is pretty creepy.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Scientists have reconstructed Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall by eavesdropping on people’s brainwaves – the first time a recognisable song has been decoded from recordings of electrical brain activity.
The hope is that doing so could ultimately help to restore the musicality of natural speech in patients who struggle to communicate because of disabling neurological conditions such as stroke or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis – the neurodegenerative disease that Stephen Hawking was diagnosed with.
Although members of the same laboratory had previously managed to decipher speech – and even silently imagined words – from brain recordings, “in general, all of these reconstruction attempts have had a robotic quality”, said Prof Robert Knight, a neurologist at the University of California in Berkeley, US, who conducted the study with the postdoctoral fellow Ludovic Bellier.
It contains a much bigger spectrum of things than limited phonemes in whatever language, that could add another dimension to an implantable speech decoder.”
The team analysed brain recordings from 29 patients as they were played an approximately three-minute segment of the Pink Floyd song, taken from their 1979 album The Wall.
This year, researchers led by Dr Alexander Huth at the University of Texas in Austin announced that they had managed to translate brain activity into a continuous stream of text using non-invasive MRI scan data.
I’m a bot and I’m open source!
How long before EMI sues them for copyright infringement?
Woah. This is pretty wild. I wonder if they could record the sound of my brain exploding while reading this article 🤯
I did, and it’s absolutely incredible. Keep in mind that the audio was recorded by sticking electrodes on a person’s brain, no speakers or anything. The fact that it is recognizable as music is amazing, but the fact that you can actually hear individual words is totally mind-blowing.
It’s recognizable only if you know what it’s supposed to be. I don’t think anyone could hear that and say “hey, that sounds like Another Brick in the Wall”. I feel like the brain fills in what’s missing and almost forces it to match the same pattern in our head. So it’s definitely cool, but still clearly a science in its early days.
Make sure you’re listening to the clip towards the middle of the article. The one from the top is unrecognizable to me.
Middle one is slightly better but far from music. It’s not mind blowing to me. If I didn’t have the suggestion I’d not guess this even a song.
I hope they allowed them to get high first. That’s a Pink Floyd requirement.
I’ve always found listening to Pink Floyd is enough of a high already, personally!
Is the song Brain Damage?
Another Brick in the Wall Pt I according to the article. Woulda picked comfortably numb or something personally.
They actually don’t specify what part so it’s probably part II (aka. the most well known Pink Floyd song for some reason).
The clip almost makes it sound more like part of the intro to Run Like Hell, though, to my ear at least.
