Roger Waters of Pink Floyd on stage at the Berlin Wall, which fell just months before, on July 21, 1990. (Photo by Michael Putland/Getty Images)
Photo: Getty Images, Michael Putland. All rights reserved.
Around 44 years ago, Roger Waters wrote and produced one of the biggest hits by British progressive rockers Pink Floyd. As is well known, this is part of the protest cycle “The Wall” and is directed against the manipulation of thought in general and the system of private schools in the United Kingdom in particular.
Now a group of neurologists has used the song for a spectacular experiment.
The results have just been published in the US journal PLOS Biology. This is a scientific platform on which researchers present their work in “open access” mode. As the PLOS self-portrayal states, gives researchers the opportunity to publish the full range of their experiments: “By offering publications that reflect the process of scientific research and a broad scope that facilitates cross-disciplinary review, participants can present their science more fully and accurately and for their gain professional recognition.”
Currently, Pink Floyd is part of the neuro research team’s “cross-disciplinary” work material. The researchers reconstructed the 1979 song “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1” using artificial intelligence. They used electrical signals from the brain to create a recognizable version of the song.
The current study uses data from 29 people. People have heard the iconic Pink Floyd track during brain surgery. They continued to be medically monitored for epileptic seizures.
When listening to “The Wall,” electrodes placed on the surface of the brain recorded the electrical activity of various brain regions that sense musical elements. The researchers further trained an artificial intelligence model to decode these signals and data and eventually electronically reproduce the sounds of the song.
This melody turned out to be “mangled”, as the study says. But she was also recognizable for normal pop fans. Complete word fragments such as “all”, “was” or “just a brick” were clearly “sung”, as the current study states. It will be interesting to see what songwriter Roger Waters thinks of these experiments…