Scientists reconstruct Pink Floyd song by listening to people’s brainwaves
Scientists reconstruct Pink Floyd song by listening to people’s brainwaves
Breakthrough raises hopes that musicality of natural speech can be restored in patients with disabling neurological conditions
Sound clip is pretty creepy.
How anyone holds onto the notion that our minds aren't simply squishy, organic computers is beyond me.
I guess you could say that but brains are orders of magnitude more complex than any computer. Saying that they're "simply" organic computers is a huge understatement.
A TI-82, an Apple II, and a 48 core Xeon rack Server are all simply computers. It isn't insulting the rack server to declare that it and an Apple II are both simply computers, despite their orders of magnitude difference in processing power, capacity, utility, etc.
Humans are far too self-important and self-reverential. We think too much of ourselves. Just barely smart enough to split the Atom, after a couple hundred thousand years of build up throwing rocks and sticks at each other in the dirt, yet still dumb enough to immediately want to use it to boomie boom rival monkey tribe, ooh ooh, aah aah!
Is the song Brain Damage?
Another Brick in the Wall Pt I according to the article. Woulda picked comfortably numb or something personally.
Maybe the listeners thought of other songs while listening to it ?
The song chosen is my personal favorite from the album:)
I hope they allowed them to get high first. That's a Pink Floyd requirement.
I've always found listening to Pink Floyd is enough of a high already, personally!
Nick: Hey does anybody wanna come see The Wall with me on Saturday night? Thought I might try an experiment—see it straight once.
Ken: Don’t do it! You’ll regret it, man. Trust me.
-- Freaks and Geeks
That's how I feel about it too
Yeah only way to enjoy their music
Woah. This is pretty wild. I wonder if they could record the sound of my brain exploding while reading this article 🤯
Did you listen to the clip? It’s barely recognizable as any song.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Scientists have reconstructed Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall by eavesdropping on people’s brainwaves – the first time a recognisable song has been decoded from recordings of electrical brain activity.
The hope is that doing so could ultimately help to restore the musicality of natural speech in patients who struggle to communicate because of disabling neurological conditions such as stroke or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis – the neurodegenerative disease that Stephen Hawking was diagnosed with.
Although members of the same laboratory had previously managed to decipher speech – and even silently imagined words – from brain recordings, “in general, all of these reconstruction attempts have had a robotic quality”, said Prof Robert Knight, a neurologist at the University of California in Berkeley, US, who conducted the study with the postdoctoral fellow Ludovic Bellier.
It contains a much bigger spectrum of things than limited phonemes in whatever language, that could add another dimension to an implantable speech decoder.”
The team analysed brain recordings from 29 patients as they were played an approximately three-minute segment of the Pink Floyd song, taken from their 1979 album The Wall.
This year, researchers led by Dr Alexander Huth at the University of Texas in Austin announced that they had managed to translate brain activity into a continuous stream of text using non-invasive MRI scan data.
I'm a bot and I'm open source!
They picked the right song for it. This technology will be used to ensure compliance.
Yeah, I'm chalking it up to a blinding idealistic need to help, that those quoted seem so excited by this. On its face, yeah, this stands to do an untold amount of good for those who for one reason or another are unable to communicate. In addition to the toys they're talking about, like composing music (and I suppose other forms of art) from imagination rather than instruments/tools.
I find research into the ability to mechanically read and monitor thoughts to be a little horrifying. It's too much of a boon to think somebody wouldn't use it, and it's the last thing nobody could access.
On the plus side this technology only works because the early brain processing for perception is well mapped out and straightforward to pick up.
We’re a long way from this to them being able to see that I’m thinking “I hope they don’t find my wife’s corpse in the back yard”.
Now do Keep Talking