This Man is Making Music Using His Brain Implant

Galen Buckwalter and his wife Deborah of the LA-based punk band Siggy (Photo: Blackrock Neurotech)

A quadriplegic man is using his brain implant to produce musical tones by assigning them to different movements identified by six chips in his brain.

Galen Buckwalter has been a quadriplegic since a diving accident when he was 16 left him paralyzed from the chest down. The 69-year-old research psychologist had the opportunity to get a brain implant in 2024 as part of a study at Caltech, and he was thrilled at the prospect. Now, not only can he feel sensation in his limbs that he had lost, but he can operate a computer with his mind and is even making music using his thoughts.

Made by Blackrock Neurotech, the six chips in his brain read activity from his neurons and decode movement intentions. The brain-computer interface (BCI) uses technology being developed by several companies, including Paradromics, Synchron, and Elon Musk’s Neuralink, to help restore movement and communication in people with severe motor impairments.

But Buckwalter and other recipients of this technology have shown that it can be used in a variety of ways that aren’t just functional. Others have been able to use their BCI as an outlet for creative expression, such as making digital art with their thoughts.

Buckwalter is a longtime musician and a member of the Los Angeles-based punk band Siggy. He’s been working with Caltech graduate student Sean Darcy, who developed an algorithm to enable him to create musical tones on the computer with his mind. He used some of the tones he’s composed in the lab in a song called “Wirehead,” which is the name of the band’s latest album, released last month.

“Each neuron has a baseline firing rate. All these neurons are firing to some extent, but what we do is identify neurons that I have volitional control of,” Buckwalter told Wired. “My six implants each have 64 independent channels to record from, and we have a big screen with all 384 channels on it. So, if I think about moving my toe up and down, a bunch of channels will light up. There seems to be a directional set of neurons that it picks up just from the extension and flexion of my toe.”

“What Sean does is he assigns a tone to the baseline firing rate. If I activate that neuron, the pitch will go up, and if I suppress it, it will come back down. I think about moving my index finger, and then think about moving my pinky, and I can do that for as many channels as I have volitional control over,” he explained. “Right now, I can do two tones at once, but if you go above that, it starts to feel like you’re rubbing your head and patting your stomach at the same time.”

He says that they’re working on being able to produce more than two tones at a time, which currently “gets a little discordant,” but something they believe is “totally possible.”

“Ultimately, I do think the potential is that we’ll have a complete DJ booth coming out of my head. We’re starting to get loops so that I can get a good rhythm loop going and then put melodies on top of it,” said Buckwalter.

“As soon as we started playing around with it and I realized what I could do, we were both like, ‘Oh yeah, we gotta record it.’ Now we want to see what we can do just with neural music,” he added. “It’s moving forward a DJ setup, where he’s kind of the knob-turner to modulate the tones that I produce. It’s new music.”

Buckwalter says that BCI research should prioritize the needs and preferences of patients, including creative pursuits.

“I’m quadriplegic for the rest of my days. I know that. But to have this be able to enhance my creative activities and give me another way of feeling, it’s awesome,” he said. “It is so empowering to be able to do entirely unique things. That’s what gets humans out of bed in the morning.”