After over a decade of research and experimentation, scientists have finally managed to reconstruct a piece of music from brain waves recorded while someone was listening to Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall Pt. 1,” and the recording of the brain wave extraction is absolutely horrifying.
The researchers detailed their findings in the journal PLOS. According to a press release on the subject, the researchers used AI to help reconstruct the brain waves and turn them into the audio recording that you can find in the video we’ve embedded below. The sound itself is a little terrifying, to say the least, though it does help scientists better understand how our brain processes these noises.
The reconstruction isn’t just strange sounds that make no sense, either. If you listen to the audio recorded from the brain wave extraction research, you can even hear the phrase “all in all it was just a brick in the wall,” come through. It isn’t exceptionally clear by any means, but it does gives some really intriguing details to show just how much of the song they were able to reconstruct from brainwaves alone.
This research shows that it is possible, but also feasible to record and translate brain waves to capture musical elements of speech. Fortunately, these types of recordings and brain waves can only be extracted or recorded from the brain’s surface, which means you won’t have to worry about anyone else looking in on your brain’s musical responses. Though Google does want to use AI to turn your brainwaves into music, however that’s something different entirely.
Future research into these same scenarios will hopefully provide even more useful data about how our brain processes such things, and in the future we could even see recordings made of other instances that showcase how the brain handles audio-based information like this, for now, we’ll remain haunted by what the scientists have showcased here.
