Meet the Man Making Music With His Brain Implant

Galen Buckwalter didn’t do it hesitant to undergo 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 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 the activity of his neurons and decode the intention of movement. They allow him to operate a computer with his thoughts, feel sensations in his lost fingers, and, more recently, make music with his mind.

Known as brain-computer interface, or BCI, the technology is being developed by Elon Musk’s Paradromics, Synchron, 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 aren’t purely functional, such as as a means of creative expression. Other BCI recipients use their implants to create digital art with their thoughts. A 2023 gallery exhibition at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, DC, featured the works of BCI recipients Nathan Copeland, James Johnson, and Jan Scheuermann.

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

WIRED spoke with Buckwalter about what it means to make music with your mind. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

WIRED: You have recently started using your implant to produce musical sounds. How did this happen?

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

So you are able to create musical sounds just by thinking. How does it work?

Each neuron has a basic firing rate. All of these neurons function to some extent, but what we do is identify the neurons that I have voluntary control over. My six implants each have 64 independent channels to record on, and we have a large screen with all 384 channels. So if I think about moving my toe up and down, many 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 assigns a tone to the base rate of fire. If I activate this neuron, the tone will go up, and if I remove it, it goes down. I think about moving my index finger, then moving my little finger, and I can do that for as many channels as I voluntarily control. Right now I can do two tones at a time, but if you go beyond that, you start to feel like you’re rubbing your head and patting your stomach at the same time.