Meet the Man Making Music With His Brain Implant

Galen Buckwalter didn’t hesitate to get a craniotomy in 2024 as part of a brain implant study at Caltech. The 69-year-old research psychologist wanted to contribute to cutting-edge science that could help other people with paralysis.

Buckwalter has been a quadriplegic since a diving accident at age 16 left him paralyzed from the chest down. The six chips in his brain, made by Blackrock Neurotech, read activity from his neurons and decode movement intention. They enable him to operate a computer with his thoughts, feel sensation in his fingers that he had lost, and, more recently, make music with his mind.

Known as a brain-computer interface, or BCI, the technology is being developed by Paradromics, Synchron, Elon Musk’s Neuralink, and others to restore communication and movement in people with severe motor disabilities. But Buckwalter’s experience shows that the technology can be used in ways that are not purely functional—for instance, as an outlet for creative expression. Other BCI recipients are using their implants to make digital art with their thoughts. A 2023 gallery exhibit at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, DC, displayed works by BCI recipients Nathan Copeland, James Johnson, and Jan Scheuermann.

Buckwalter has been working with Caltech graduate student Sean Darcy, who developed an algorithm that allows him to create musical tones on a computer with his thoughts. Buckwalter, a longtime musician with the Los Angeles-based punk rock band Siggy, has used some of the tones he has composed in the lab in a song called “Wirehead,” also the name of the band’s latest album released on March 15.

WIRED spoke with Buckwalter about what it’s like to make music with his mind. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

WIRED: You recently started using your implant to produce musical tones. How did that come about?

Galen Buckwalter: Even before I was implanted, I saw this clip that was going around YouTube of mushrooms, where if you put electrodes on mushrooms you get this biosonification. It will amplify the electrical activity going on in a mushroom, and you get these really cool sounds. I saw that and thought, if a mushroom can chirp like that, I want to know what my brain sounds like. That was something that was on my agenda that I wanted to do with the Caltech team. From day one, I was talking to all the researchers about it, and this amazing grad student, Sean Darcy, heard about it. He spent his time on weekends and nights coming up with this software that translates what I think into the ability to manipulate tones.

So you’re able to create musical tones just by thinking. How does that work?

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. 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 from just 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. 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.

You’re thinking about a particular movement, and each of those movements is assigned a different tone?

Yeah.

Wow. And right now, you’re able to produce two tones at once by thinking about two different movements simultaneously?

Right. Any more than that and it gets a little discordant. But it’s something we’re working on. I think it’s 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.

Sean has also come up with a kind of keyboard, so the tone will only play if I go above a certain threshold, and then if I bring it back down it’ll go off. It starts to be like playing an instrument.

Does it require a lot of concentration?

Yeah, at least to learn. From one day to another, the channels can actually be detecting different neurons. Sometimes channel 54 might be our go-to neuron and then one day it’s just not happening for us. We have to find the neurons that are happening that day and what I need to do to activate them. Then we go from there.

Tell me more about how the virtual keyboard works.

I’m thinking about movement primarily, but I just have to get the movement above a threshold to get the tone. I can think about moving my index finger, and then think about my middle finger and activate different neurons and get them to give me the tone, but then to suppress that takes more focused effort. It’s trippy to think that we can control individual neurons in our brains. I don’t know what the long term implications of that are, but I find it really fascinating that we can do that.

Has music always been important to you?

I have a punk band, Siggy. We’ve been together for 29 years. It’s a huge part of my life—getting together, creating, and playing shows on occasion. We actually used one of the tracks I created with my neural signals for a song called “Wirehead,” which is kind of a punk reflection on the possibilities of BCIs and all that good stuff.

I do have some frustration with the whole academic approach to BCI, which is that it’s not always considering the interests of the participants. The researchers have their experiments and aren’t really saying, “Hey, how can we work with you to make your life more interesting?” The community has to incorporate that if this technology is really going to advance. It’s going to make the technology more enjoyable for the people using it.

I think we should absolutely be exploring how to use this to advance creativity. Restoration, yeah, that’s first and foremost. But we’re a lot more than just moving and sensing. I think that’s where getting the subjective experience to not only be considered but to drive the research is really important.

And you proposed this research project to Caltech?

I had proposed it initially, but Sean took it and he ran with it. What we’re doing is much more advanced than what I was thinking of. It’s like I have an orchestra in my brain, and I just have to learn how to play it.

Once you started making these tones, did you immediately want to incorporate them into your band’s music?

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. It’s moving toward a DJ setup, where he’s kind of the knob turner to modulate the tones that I produce. It’s new music.

What did your bandmates think?

They were all in.

What was it like to hear these tones out loud for the first time?

The first time they hooked me up after surgery, they had a huge screen there with all 384 channels. To just look at your brain, at the neurons firing, and then to start doing different things and seeing that you could control the firing, honest to God, I’ve felt such a sense of awe. This is brave new territory. It was so cool. Then hearing the sounds for the first time was very much similar to that. With the sounds, the fact that I’m controlling it is much more evident. When I’m thinking about moving my toe and all of a sudden there’s this pitch, it’s like, whoa. It’s just mind-blowing. It’s so fun. I leave those sessions feeling like I’ve been playing with my band for a while. You just get into that creative flow state.

Is your next goal to compose a full song that’s straight from your brain?

We’re already playing around with that. We’re not going to stop until we get to the sphere.

I want to circle back to a point you made earlier about how BCI research should prioritize the needs and preferences of patients. Why do you think creativity is such an important component for developers to consider?

I’m a 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. It is so empowering to be able to do entirely unique things. That’s what gets humans out of bed in the morning. Just the fact that I find this so rewarding and so motivating, that should make developers realize that in order for this technology to really succeed, people have to love it. They have to love the experience of it.