Brain recordings capture musicality of speech — with help from Pink Floyd

Researchers at UC Berkeley and collaborating institutions reconstructed a recognizable song from brain recordings for the first time, using intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) data from 29 patients listening to Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1." The reconstruction, reported in PLOS Biology, keeps the song's rhythms, and the lyric "All in all it was just a brick in the wall" is recognizable though muddy. Robert Knight says the approach could add musicality, or prosody, to future brain implants for people who cannot speak clearly, while Ludovic Bellier notes that noninvasive techniques are not yet accurate enough.