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Is the song Brain Damage?
Another Brick in the Wall Pt I according to the article. Woulda picked comfortably numb or something personally.
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They actually don’t specify what part so it’s probably part II (aka. the most well known Pink Floyd song for some reason). The clip almost makes it sound more like the intro to Run Like Hell, though.
I mean it’s a pretty song that people like to sing along, but they don’t know what it means.
The first part is the intro to part I. The second part is too ambiguous to know. It’s just the vocals saying “another brick in the wall”. I didn’t actually know there were two clips originally, so the second one is somewhat interesting.
I hope they allowed them to get high first. That’s a Pink Floyd requirement.
I’ve always found listening to Pink Floyd is enough of a high already, personally!
Nick: Hey does anybody wanna come see The Wall with me on Saturday night? Thought I might try an experiment—see it straight once.
Ken: Don’t do it! You’ll regret it, man. Trust me.
– Freaks and Geeks
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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.
I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Now do Keep Talking
They picked the right song for it. This technology will be used to ensure compliance.
Yeah, I’m chalking it up to a blinding idealistic need to help, that those quoted seem so excited by this. On its face, yeah, this stands to do an untold amount of good for those who for one reason or another are unable to communicate. In addition to the toys they’re talking about, like composing music (and I suppose other forms of art) from imagination rather than instruments/tools.
I find research into the ability to mechanically read and monitor thoughts to be rightly horrifying.
