Thread by @NTFabiano

Music can be reconstructed from the auditory cortex.

🧵1/9

These findings are from a study in @PLOSBiology which analyzed a unique intracranial electroencephalography dataset of 29 patients who listened to a @pinkfloyd song and applied a stimulus reconstruction approach previously used in the speech domain. 2/9 journals.plos.org/plosbiology/ar…

Music perception relies on a broad network of subcortical and cortical regions, including primary and secondary auditory cortices, sensorimotor areas, and inferior frontal gyri (IFG). 3/9

Despite extensive overlap with the speech perception network, some brain regions of the temporal and frontal lobes are preferentially activated during music perception. 4/9

In this study, 29 neurosurgical patients passively listened to the popular rock song Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1 (by Pink Floyd), while their neural activity was recorded from a total of 2,668 electrodes directly lying on their cortical surface. 5/9

Then, the auditory spectrogram of the song stimulus was reconstructed from the elicited high-frequency activity using a regression approach. 6/9

A recognizable song was successfully reconstructed from direct neural recordings and quantified the impact of different factors on decoding accuracy. 7/9

It was found that music perception relied on both hemispheres, with a preference for the right hemisphere. 8/9

Overall, these findings show the feasibility of applying predictive modeling on short datasets acquired in single patients, paving the way for adding musical elements to brain–computer interface (BCI) applications. 9/9