Meet the man who makes music with his brain transplant

Galen Buckwalter didn’t do that She is reluctant to perform a craniotomy in 2024 as part of a brain transplant 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 when he was 16 that left him paralyzed from the chest down. The six chips in his brain, made by Blackrock Neurotech, read activity from his neurons and decode the intention to move. It enables him to operate a computer with his thoughts, feel the sensation he’s lost in his fingers, and, most recently, compose music with his mind.

Known as 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 technology can be used in ways that are not purely functional, for example, as an outlet for creative expression. Other BCI recipients use their implants to make digital art with their ideas. A 2023 exhibition at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C., showcased the work of BCI recipients Nathan Copeland, James Johnson, and Jan Scheuermann.

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

WIRED spoke with Buckwalter about how he makes music with his mind. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Wired: You have recently started using your implant to produce musical tones. How did that happen?

Galen Buckwalter: Even before I was transplanted, I saw this clip that was going around on YouTube about mushrooms, where if you put electrodes on mushrooms you get this bio-fat. It will amplify the electrical activity that’s happening in the mushrooms, and you’ll get these really cool sounds. I saw that and thought, if mushrooms can sing like that, I want to know what my brain looks like. This was something that was on my agenda and I wanted to do with the Caltech team. Since day one, I’ve been talking to all the researchers about this topic, and my amazing graduate student, Sean Darcy, heard about it. He spent his time on weekends and nights creating this software that translates what I think into the ability to manipulate tones.

So you are able to create musical tones just by thinking. How does this work?

Each neuron has a basal firing rate. All of these neurons are active to some degree, but what we do is determine which neurons I control voluntarily. All 6 of my implants have 64 independent channels to record from, and we have a large 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 group of neurons that pick up just from the extension and flexion of my toe.

What Sean does is he sets the tone for his basic firing rate. If you activate that neuron, the pitch will go up, and if you suppress it, it will go down again. I think about moving my index finger, and then I think about moving my pinky, and I can do this with any number of channels that I control voluntarily. Now I can do two tunes at once, but if I go beyond that, it feels like you’re rubbing your head and patting your belly at the same time.