For those with neurological or developmental disorders compromising speech, brain machine interfaces could help them communicate. But today's interfaces are slow and, from electrodes placed on the scalp, can detect letters only. The speech generated is robotic and affectless. Neuroscientists have now shown that they can reconstruct the song a person is hearing from brain recordings alone, holding out the possibility of reconstructing not only words but the musicality of speech, which also conveys meaning.
As the chords of Pink Floyd's"Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1," filled the surgery suite, neuroscientists at Albany Medical Center diligently recorded the activity of electrodes placed on the brains of patients undergoing epilepsy surgery.
The phrase"All in all it was just a brick in the wall" comes through recognizably in the reconstructed song, its rhythms intact, and the words muddy, but decipherable. This is the first time researchers have reconstructed a recognizable song from brain recordings. But for people who have trouble communicating, whether because of stroke or paralysis, such recordings from electrodes on the brain surface could help reproduce the musicality of speech that's missing from today's robot-like reconstructions."It's a wonderful result," said Robert Knight, a neurologist and UC Berkeley professor of psychology in the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute who conducted the study with postdoctoral fellow Ludovic Bellier.
Bellier should know. He has played music since childhood -- drums, classical guitar, piano and bass, at one point performing in a heavy metal band. When Knight asked him to work on the musicality of speech, Bellier said,"You bet I was excited when I got the proposal." That work, reported in 2021, employed artificial intelligence to interpret the brain recordings from a patient trying to vocalize a sentence based on a set of 50 words.
For the new study, Bellier reanalyzed brain recordings obtained in 2012 and 2013 as patients were played an approximately 3-minute segment of the Pink Floyd song, which is from the 1979 album. He hoped to go beyond previous studies, which had tested whether decoding models could identify different musical pieces and genres, to actually reconstruct music phrases through regression-based decoding models.
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