Galen Buckwalter, a 69-year-old research psychologist paralysed from the chest down since a diving accident at sixteen, has become what may be the first person to perform and record music generated entirely by brain implants.
Buckwalter enrolled in a brain-computer interface study at the California Institute of Technology in 2024 and underwent a craniotomy to receive six Blackrock Neurotech Utah arrays, each carrying 64 microelectrodes, across his motor, sensory and frontal cortices. The 384-channel setup is unusual: most BCI trials place arrays only in motor cortex. The broader coverage gives researchers at Caltech and the University of Southern California, led by neuroscientist Richard Andersen, simultaneous access to movement intent, somatosensory feedback and higher-order cognitive signals.
The clinical aims of the study have already yielded results. Buckwalter can control a virtual hand with his thoughts, moving two fingers and a thumb. Stimulation through the sensory arrays has restored touch sensations in digits that had been numb for decades. Internal-speech recognition is also under development.
The music project began as a side question. Before surgery, Buckwalter had seen a viral clip of biosonified mushrooms whose electrical activity was converted into chirping audio. He asked the Caltech team whether something similar could be done with his neural signals. Sean Darcy, a graduate student in the lab, took it on, writing custom software that maps neuronal firing patterns to musical pitch in real time. Higher neural activity raises the tone; suppression lowers it. Darcy later layered a virtual keyboard on top of the continuous control, so tones only sound when activity crosses a threshold and cut off when it drops, giving Buckwalter something closer to a playable instrument than a raw data stream.
The system currently supports two simultaneous tones, which Buckwalter controls by imagining movements of different body parts. He describes the experience of playing multiple parts as like “rubbing your head and patting your stomach.” The connection between neurons and channels is unstable, requiring daily recalibration before each session. During recording, Darcy acts as a live engineer, adjusting parameters while Buckwalter performs.
The results have already made it onto a record. Buckwalter’s Los Angeles punk band, Siggy, which has been active for twenty-nine years, incorporated a lab-generated track into “Wirehead,” the title song of their latest album, released on streaming platforms on 15 March. The ten-track album also features guitarist and clinical psychologist Ryan Howes, bassist and neuropsychologist Deborah Buckwalter, and drummer Paul Netherton.
The work sits at a boundary that BCI research is only beginning to explore. Nearly every implanted neural interface in clinical use today is designed to restore a lost function: typing, cursor control, speech, movement. Buckwalter’s case suggests the same hardware and decoding infrastructure can support creative applications that go well beyond restoration. “Restoration, yeah, that’s first and foremost,” Buckwalter told reporters. “But we’re a lot more than just moving and sensing.”
Blackrock Neurotech’s Utah array remains the most widely implanted intracortical electrode in BCI research, with a track record spanning more than two decades and use in studies at institutions including Brown University, Stanford, and now Caltech. The company has not commented publicly on the music application. Buckwalter is also collaborating with Arizona State University on a “digital clone” trained on his language patterns, another non-clinical use of the interface that suggests the range of applications for high-channel-count implants may be wider than the current generation of trials is designed to test.