The ultimate measurement

Apparently scientists are attempting the re-creation of music being listened to by interpreting EEG/fMRI readings.

…construct a neural decoding model that is able to reconstruct the music heard by a participant from their EEG. We use this neural decoding model to reconstruct heard music from a cohort of 18 participants and then evaluate the efficacy of our reconstructed music by using it to attempt to identify which piece of music (from a set of 36 different music pieces) each participant was listening to within each music listening epoch.

If taken to a successful conclusion, this would of course allow for the ultimate in room correction! No, even better – brain correction! Play test patterns in at one end, get the same patterns out by scanning the listener’s brain! Targeted brain micro-surgeries to correct for distortions!

In my case, a lot of distorsions would disappear if they planted a brain in to start with.

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Objective measurements derived from the ultimate subjectivity?

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Will this improve anything for those obsessed with hearing ‘noise’ here there and everywhere?

There’s a David Cronenberg movie in here somewhere. I’ll have to knock together a script…

[Scene 1: a middle-class suburban living room. The Audiophile is on his hands and knees, installing cable lifters to maintain a constant 4 cm distance between his speaker cables and the floor. His wife comes in from the other room, looks at him for a minute, shakes her head, and goes back into the other room. The doorbell rings, and his wife comes out again to answer it. The front door opens into the living room.]

Wife: Hello?

Deliveryman: Delivery for [looks at his phone] Mr. A?

Wife: Yes?

Deliveryman: Where shall we put them?

[Camera moves to shot of front yard through the front door. Two hulking wooden packing cases, clearly too large to fit through the door, loom in the front yard.]

Audiophile (voice, offscreen): Are they here? The speakers?

[Wife turns to Audiophile, camera following to reveal him, still on hands and knees, face upturned with eager expression.]

Wife: You bought these things? How did you pay for them? You know what our credit-card debt looks like!

Audiophile: I sold the car, dear. {Gets to his feet.] These are the new electrostatics!

And of course the final scene:

[Audiophile, on operating table, in shadowy room surrounded by masked and gowned figures half-hidden in gloom, murmuring to each other. Atonal music (test patterns) plays in jarring rhythms. The top of the Audiophile’s skull has been removed, and his brain glistens moistly as the figures do things to it, each manipulation followed by a fresh burst of the atonal music.]

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