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Scientists Recreate Pink Floyd Song by Reading Brain Signals of Listeners

NIBIB in the News
August 17, 2023

The audio sounds like it’s being played underwater. Still, it’s a first step toward creating more expressive devices to assist people who can’t speak.

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Scientists have trained a computer to analyze the brain activity of someone listening to music and, based only on those neuronal patterns, recreate the song.

The research produced a recognizable, if muffled version of Pink Floyd’s 1979 song, “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 1).”

Before this, researchers had figured out how to use brain activity to reconstruct music with similar features to the song someone was listening to. Now, “you can actually listen to the brain and restore the music that person heard,” said Gerwin Schalk, a neuroscientist who directs a research lab in Shanghai and collected data for this study. Source: New York Times