Recreating music thanks to the electrical brain activity of those who listen to that same music: this is the feat of a team of American neuroscientists who have managed to reconstruct the title Another brick in the wall of the group Pink Floyd.
Scientists from the University of California Berkeley wanted above all to understand the brain mechanisms related to listening to music and, above all, thanks to which parts of the brain musical perception could work.
29 volunteer patients
For the experiment, the researchers placed electrodes in the brains of 29 volunteer patients admitted to neurosurgery, particularly due to drug-resistant epilepsy. They then had to listen carefully to the song, which lasted 190 seconds.
The recording of the brain waves of the different patients was then processed by an artificial intelligence, which transformed these waves into music and words. The result: an audio recording of about fifteen seconds, robotic sound mixing and underwater recording, where certain phrases from the song still manage to stand out, in particular “it’s just another brick in the wall”.
Thanks to this experiment, the scientists were able to understand above all that musical perception manifests itself with a predominance of the right hemisphere of the brain, “with a major role of the superior temporal gyrus”. Eventually, this type of experiment could no longer be carried out with electrodes in the brain, but rather on the scalp, to make the operation easier and more accessible.
The goal remains, above all, to find a reliable and effective solution so that people who have speech difficulties can communicate successfully, using only their brain activity and trying to transcribe it into words thanks to new technologies.
Source: BFM TV
