In August 2023, scientists published their research of their breakthrough to reconstruct the song named "Another Brick in the Wall" by Pink Floyd by listening to human brain waves.
The team examined brain recordings from 29 patients as they were played approximately a 3 minute long recording of "Another Brick in the Wall". The brain activity of the patients were detected with electrodes placed directly on the surface of their brains as they went through a surgery for epilepsy.
Then, AI took the stage and decoded the recordings to encode a reproduction of the words and sounds of the song. Although the phrase “All in all, it’s just another brick in the wall” came out muffled, the melody and the rhythms seemed unbroken.
Unlike previous work which had focused on analysing electrical signal from the brain's speech motor cortex (where tiny muscle movements of lips, larynx, jaw, etc. are controlled), this study used recordings from the brain's auditory region of the brain (where sound is processed).
One of the conductors of the study, Prof Robert Knight - a neurologist at the University of California in Berkeley- says using a higher density of electrodes might enhance the quality of their vocal reconstruction. “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 says.
This research ultimately hopes to enable restoring the musical quality of natural human speech in patients who struggle in communicating due to disabling neurologic conditions.
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Written by: İdil Ada Aydos
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