Science and Music: Scientists Reconstruct Hit …

Scientists have reconstructed itanother brick in the wallby Pink Floyd by analyzing people’s brain waves – the first time identifiable music has been decoded from recordings of the brain’s electrical activity.

The hope is that this research will eventually help restore normal speech in patients who have difficulty communicating due to disabling neurological conditions. Some examples are cases of stroke or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis – the neurodegenerative disease that Stephen Hawking was diagnosed with.

Although members of the same lab were already able to decode speech — and even silently imagined words — from brain recordings, “In general, all these attempts at reconstruction were of a mechanistic nature.said Professor Robert Knight, a neurologist at New York University. The University of California, Berkeley, conducted the study with postdoctoral fellow Ludovic Pellier.

says that “Music, by its very nature, is emotional and performance–it contains rhythm, emphasis, tone, and tone. It has a much wider range than the finite phonemic elements of any one language, which may add another dimension to an implantable speech decoder.“.

The team analyzed recordings of the brains of 29 patients while they played a roughly three-minute clip of the English band’s song taken from their 1979 album “The Wall”. The volunteers’ brain activity was detected by placing electrodes directly on the surface of their brains during epilepsy surgery.

AI was then used to decode the recordings and then encode a transcript of the sounds and words. Although it is very muffled, the phrase “In short, it’s just another brick in the wall.It appears most clearly in the reconstructed song – with its rhythms and melody intact.

“It’s like they’re talking underwater, but it’s our first chance to do that.” Knight said. “Now that we know how to do it, I think if we had electrodes a millimeter and a half apart, the sound quality would be much better.“.

As brain recording techniques improve, it may also be possible to make such recordings without the need for surgery – perhaps with sensitive electrodes attached to the scalp.

See also:

‘It Used To Be Young’: Miley Cyrus Announces Single

Inside Antenna 1: Behind the scenes of our music programming

Special discounts for distributors