Elon Musk’s Neuralink recently received FDA approval for human trials, while neuroscientists from UC Berkeley have already managed to reconstruct a Pink Floyd song purely from brain recordings. They achieved this by recording the activity of electrodes placed on the brains of patients being prepared for epilepsy surgery.
This enabled them to capture the electrical activity of brain regions tuned to attributes of the music — tone, rhythm, harmony and words — to see if it was possible to reconstruct what the patient was hearing. As you can hear from the Pink Floyd demo clip above, this reconstruction shows the possiblities of recording and translating brain waves to capture the musical elements of speech, as well as the syllables.
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It’s a wonderful result. One of the things for me about music is it has prosody and emotional content. 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 ALS or some other disabling neurological or developmental disorder compromising speech output. It gives you an ability to decode not only the linguistic content, but some of the prosodic content of speech, some of the affect. I think that’s what we’ve really begun to crack the code on,” said Robert Knight, a neurologist and UC Berkeley professor of psychology in the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute.
