Mind-music fusion: Pink Floyd's 'Another Brick in the Wall' reconstructed from brain activity of listeners
Brain activity of people listening to Pink Floyd's 'Another Brick in the Wall' was used to reconstruct the classic rock number, scientists report in a new study. The reconstruction reveals that brain waves can be recorded and processed to bring out musical elements of the speech heard, such as rhythm, stress, accent and intonation, along with the syllables, the study from the University of California (UC), Berkeley, US, said. These musical elements are known to convey meaning in ways that spoken words alone do not. The phrase «All in all it was just a brick in the wall» could be recognised in the reproduced song, with its rhythms intact and the words muddy yet decipherable, the researchers report in the study published in the journal PLoS Biology. The listeners were 29 patients undergoing epilepsy surgery at Albany Medical Center, New York, US, over a decade ago. Neuroscientists at the centre recorded electrical activity through electrodes placed on the patients' brains as they heard an approximately 3-minute segment of the classic Pink Floyd song from the 1979 album The Wall. «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 some disabling neurological or developmental disorder compromising speech output.
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»It gives you an ability to decode not only the linguistic content, but some of the prosodic content of speech, some of the (emotional) affect," said Robert Knight, a neurologist and UC Berkeley professor of psychology who conducted the study with postdoctoral fellow Ludovic Bellier. The brain
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