Technology has taken a strange leap recently when AI was able to recreate a passable cover of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the wall part 1” by analysing the brain activity of people recorded while they listened to the original.
Robert Knight at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues studied recordings from electrodes that had been surgically implanted onto the surface of 29 people’s brains to treat epilepsy. Knight and his team compared the brain signal recordings with the original song, and identified recordings from a subset of electrodes that were strongly linked to the pitch, melody, harmony and rhythm of the song.
Using this information they then trained an AI to learn links between brain activity and these musical components. The trained AI generated a prediction of the unseen song snippet based on the participants’ brain signals. The spectrogram – a visualisation of the audio waves – of the AI-generated clip was 43 per cent similar to the real song clip.
Here is the original recording:
And here is what AI generated:
While it’s by no means a slam dunk the study did help Knight and his team identify an area of the brain called the superior temporal gyrus which processes the rhythm of the guitar and were further able to discover that signals from the right hemisphere of the brain are more important for processing music than those from the left. The work is expected to aid in the creation of devices to help those with speech difficulties make themselves understood
