Scientists reconstruct Pink Floyd song by listening to people’s brainwaves
Scientists reconstruct Pink Floyd song by listening to people’s brainwaves
Breakthrough raises hopes that musicality of natural speech can be restored in patients with disabling neurological conditions
It's pretty rough, if you listen to the audio in the article. You can just about make out the words and the key, and the fact that there's some kind of harmonic resolution on "the wall", but the rest of the harmony and melody don't really seem to be there. Still, amazing that even this is possible.
it's interesting, if u asked me to be honest about it, i would say that's pretty close to how i actually perceive songs in my head when i have something stuck in there. Maybe it's just me, but I don't think i can imagine all of the instruments of a song at once while replaying a song in my head. There's like the words (if I know them), and maybe like the broad melody and the accents from other instruments, but that's about it.
Some of the tones felt like they were following the bassline in my opinion
It's actually pretty recognizable, but that's because it is Part 1 of Another Brick In The Wall, not the well known Part 2.
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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.
What a lovely bot!
Well that's eerie as hell
It is "Another Brick In The Wall Part 1", not Part 2 which everyone knows. Curious about the choice of Part 1; I guess that Part 1 doesn't have such a strong rhythm/groove as Part 2, thus making it easier to reconstruct?
Of all the Pink Floyd songs they could have chosen, why on earth "Another Brick in the Wall Pt. 1"? Still, this is awesome.
One of their most well known or recognizable songs. It's the only one I know off hand.
Edit : I may be conflating part 1 and 2
Yeah, that would be part 2. Part one is not generally played on radio- they would have had to start out with fans of the band or at least fans of that album, which is why I wonder "why that song?"