It's pretty rough, if you listen to the audio in the article. You can just about make out the words and the key, and the fact that there's some kind of harmonic resolution on "the wall", but the rest of the harmony and melody don't really seem to be there. Still, amazing that even this is possible.
this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
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it's interesting, if u asked me to be honest about it, i would say that's pretty close to how i actually perceive songs in my head when i have something stuck in there. Maybe it's just me, but I don't think i can imagine all of the instruments of a song at once while replaying a song in my head. There's like the words (if I know them), and maybe like the broad melody and the accents from other instruments, but that's about it.
Interesting, for me I can hear the song vocals and instruments in my head exactly like listening to it, but I can't play an instrument or sing on key...even though I know exactly how it should sound
I feel like this could just be a result of your brain being very good at fooling you into thinking you perceive something when you don't. It's kind of like how you can "see" a huge landscape in very fine details, but really the only part you actually see well is the centre of your visual field.
I would disagree with the fooling, because if I try to sing I know its bad or wrong instantly because I have the full audio clip in my head to compare to. I can describe it in extreme detail, and recall the bass line, guitar, other instruments, even the unique vocal sound from a singer, and even direct somebody in how/why they don't sound like the song. i just have zero muscial ability on my own. Now if it is drawing though I can recall in 3d and draw a map or house plan down to fine detail after seeing it once and even decades ago. It's like what they call those flashbulb memories. Faces I would say are fooled in my head as you said about landscapes. I can visualize somebodies faces somewhat, but couldn't draw them very accurately. And names I will often forget if I haven't seen the person in a long time. The brain is weird. My wife does not know what I look like if she closes her eyes. I had sent a picture of a coworker before and she asked when I shaved my beard? I'm like that isn't me. LOL
I don't mean to say that you would be incapable of imagining each of the details of a piece. What I mean is that at any given moment, you're only paying attention to a small part of the piece while your brain fills in the rest with an approximation so it appears as if you hear the whole thing at once.
Possibly, like if I focus on lyrics I hear all the lyrics, if I focus on the music I hear all the instruments.
Some of the tones felt like they were following the bassline in my opinion
It's actually pretty recognizable, but that's because it is Part 1 of Another Brick In The Wall, not the well known Part 2.
And people laugh at my tin foil hat, now who is stoopid????
I only laugh because tinfoil doesn't stop mind reading, it makes it easier. If you want to stop it, you need a copper faraday cage around your entire head.
🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:
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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.
What a lovely bot!
It is "Another Brick In The Wall Part 1", not Part 2 which everyone knows. Curious about the choice of Part 1; I guess that Part 1 doesn't have such a strong rhythm/groove as Part 2, thus making it easier to reconstruct?
Well that's eerie as hell
Of all the Pink Floyd songs they could have chosen, why on earth "Another Brick in the Wall Pt. 1"? Still, this is awesome.
One of their most well known or recognizable songs. It's the only one I know off hand.
Edit : I may be conflating part 1 and 2
Yeah, that would be part 2. Part one is not generally played on radio- they would have had to start out with fans of the band or at least fans of that album, which is why I wonder "why that song?"