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A Quadriplegic Punk Rocker Got Brain Implants That Let Him Make Music: ‘We’ll Have a Complete DJ Booth Coming Out of My Head’

Research psychologist Galen Buckwalter is also a member of LA punk band Siggy.

By Stephen Andrew Galiher

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If there has ever been a personification of “you can do anything you put your mind to,” it’s Galen Buckwalter. The 69-year-old research psychologist and L.A.-based punk rock musician is quadriplegic, but underwent a procedure to have implants surgically placed in his brain, allowing him to create sounds and make music.

Manufactured by Blackrock Neurotech, there are a total of six chips in his brain that read neuronal activity. They then decode those movement intentions. The brain-computer interface (BCI) uses emerging technology “to help restore movement and communication in people with severe motor impairments,” according to Digital Music News.

For Buckwalter, the result has been transformative, allowing him to make music with his band, Siggy. You can check out the band’s song “Wirehead” below.

Speaking with Wired, Buckwalter shed some light on how it all works. “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,” he explained. “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,” Buckwalter continued. “There seems to be a directional set of neurons that it picks up just from the extension and flexion of my toe.”

Buckwalter joked that making more than ‘two tones at once’ is like the sensation of patting your stomach while rubbing your head simultaneously

Notably, the punk rock scientist gets some help from Sean Darcy, a colleague and Caltech graduate student. Darcy developed an algorithm that enables Buckwalter to create musical tones on a computer using only his mind.

“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,” Buckwalter clarified. “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.”

Buckwalter believes there is significant “potential” for this technology. He quipped that, soon enough, they’ll even “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,” he said. “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.”

Buckwalter’s band, Siggy, released their new album, ‘Wirehead’, in March

Regarding his collaborations with Darcy, Buckwlater liked it to “moving forward a DJ setup.” The Caltech student is “kind of the knob-turner to modulate the tones that I produce. It’s new music.”

Finally, Buckwalter weighed in on the necessity of how BCI impacts people like himself who would otherwise not have these opportunities. “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 shared. “It is so empowering to be able to do entirely unique things. That’s what gets humans out of bed in the morning.”

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