Reconstructed Tune of Pink Floyd’s Song Shows New Insights on How Brain Processes Music

Brain recordings of people who listened to Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 1)" were able to reconstruct the music. The song wasn't perfect, but recognizable. It also reportedly showed how the brain processes music.

Brain Recordings Reconstruct Pink Floyd's Song

The guitar chords have an odd echo like they came from the bottom of a well. Even the singer's voice is muddled, and the lyrics are hardly understandable. However, one would recognize that the song was a sample of "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 1)" from Floyd's album "The Wall," which was a major hit in the U.K. in 1979.

The song was recreated using brain records from those who had listened. The reconstructed melody offers fresh perspectives on the areas of the brain where music is processed.

According to Robert Zatorre, a neuroscientist at McGill University who was not involved in the work, the reconstruction is a "technical tour de force" that offers fresh insight into how the brain perceives music.

Over ten years ago, neuroscientists at Albany Medical Center captured activity from electrodes implanted in the brains of epileptic patients. Every 29 patients had 2668 electrodes implanted to capture brain activity throughout a seizure. But the treatment also gave researchers a once-in-a-lifetime chance to study how the brain reacts to music. The brain's left hemisphere is home to most people's language comprehension brain regions.

However, some studies have indicated that the perception of music relies on a much wider, more intricate network of brain areas, which may incorporate both hemispheres.

The researchers chose to play the said music to the participants simply because they loved Pink Floyd, according to Ludovic Bellier, a neuroscientist and computational researcher at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, who led the new study about harnessing brain recordings. The band's more well-known hit, "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)," was among the tracks the patients heard, but those who listened to the less well-known song had the most accurate brain scans.

The study has some limitations. For instance, it didn't consider how often the patients listened to Pink Floyd or if they loved the music. These variables might have affected their brain activity, influencing the decoding model's performance. Their vision of the world is shaped by familiarity, according to Baillet. He added that appreciating music is a very personal endeavor.

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Significance of Brain's Ability to Reconstruct Music

Bellier hopes the research will one day assist people with trouble speaking due to strokes, accidents, or degenerative conditions like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Many of these patients can now communicate through brain-machine interfaces, which is "a fantastic advancement," according to Bellier, thanks to the developments in assistive technology.

He points out, however, that these technologies cannot accurately mimic speech's musical quality, and patients' voices tend to sound artificial and stiff. He hypothesizes that brain-machine interfaces that rely on artificial intelligence could account for these musical components, enabling patients to converse more naturally.

At present, invasive surgery is necessary to deploy technology like that used in the latest study since such in-depth recordings can only be obtained from the brain's surface. However, with technological advancements, it might be possible to make such recordings without opening the skull, potentially using electrodes attached to the scalp.

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