Scientists Successfully Recreate Pink Floyd Song From Brain Wave Recording

by James Veltri

We love us some music and we know you do too. How do we know that? Because we can read your mind thanks to some exciting new research by a team of neuroscientists right here in the Empire State. (Link to audio recordings below)

Researchers at the Albany Medical Center in Albany, NY set out to reconstruct music from recordings gathered via intracranial electroencephalography. To test their theory, they instructed 29 patients being treated for pharmacoresistant epilepsy to listen passively to music played through headphones. Passive listening was chosen so that other brain processes involving decision making or motor coordination did not introduce noise into the process. While the subjects listened, their neural responses were recorded by the sensors that had previously been surgically implanted in their brains.

Recording and deciphering neural activity is not a new technique, and has been used previously to record and study how the brain responds to speech. The novelty here was the focus on music and the carefully crafted methods employed to both properly capture and accurately reconstruct a piece of music.

The song chosen for this project was Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1. Ironically, the second line in Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2 is “We don’t need no thought control”. Is mind reading what Roger Waters was thinking about when he penned those lyrics? Hmmm.

The researchers found that placement and density of electrodes affects the quality and recognizability of the recording. This was not particularly surprising, but they did note that adding additional electrodes beyond a certain point had diminishing returns. In the 29 patients the researchers had a total of 2668 ECoG electrodes to work with. Of those, 347 electrodes were deemed to be most relevant to the task.

After the neural activity was captured, the team had to encode, decode and analyze various elements of the data. Part of that process involved analyzing the recordings using machine learning to reconstruct the music… because why not use AI to analyze recordings of human brain activity.

The results are haunting and ethereal, but pretty clearly recognizable as the Pink Floyd anthem. Listen to the recordings yourself and see what you think. (click through to Figure 5 to hear the original audio and then 6 for the audio reconstructed from brain scans)

This is still just a research project but the techniques involved promise to get a lot more accurate over time. As scientists get better at locating the regions of the brain that correlate to specific information processing, they’ll also be able to better capture various types of brain activity.

So in conclusion, all you tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists out there… you were right! The government can read your mind. Well not yet, but probably soon. In the meantime, just enjoy that cup of coffee.