The participants’ brain activity was recorded while they listened to Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1 by Pink Floyd. By comparing the brain signals with the song, the researchers identified recordings from a subset of electrodes that were strongly linked to the pitch, melody, harmony and rhythm of the song.
They then trained an AI to learn links between brain activity and these musical components, excluding a 15-second segment of the song from the training data. 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.1