Researchers use brain activity to reconstruct Pink Floyd’s ‘Another Brick in the Wall’
Researchers at UC Berkeley in California have come together in using detectable brain activity to reconstruct a passable version of the classic Pink Floyd song ‘Another Brick in the Wall (Part 1)’ from their album The Wall.
The scientific project has been undertaken to find out more about the effect that music has on the human brain. The UC Berkeley researchers place electrodes on the skulls of several neurological patients and read their brain patterns.
The electrodes also read the patients ‘prosody’, i.e. the rhythm, stress, accent and intonation of sound, which gives more information than the mere word spoken or sung. The researchers found that they were able to read lyrics from the Pink Floyd song.
The lyrics detected were not perfect to the originals, though. The originals read, “All in all, it’s just another brick in the wall”, whereas the scientists found the words, “All in all, it was just a brick in the wall.”
Robert Knight, the neurologist, noted, “It’s a wonderful result. One of the things for me about music is it has prosody and emotional content. As this whole field of brain-machine interfaces progresses, this gives you a way to add musicality to future brain implants for people who need it”.
“Someone who’s got ALS or some other disabling neurological or developmental disorder compromising speech output,” Knight added. “It gives you the ability to decode not only the linguistic content but some of the prosodic content of speech, some of the effect. I think that’s what we’ve really begun to crack the code on.”
Check out the classic Pink Floyd track below.
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