The hope is that doing so could ultimately help to restore the musicality of natural speech in patients who struggle to communicate because of disabling neurological conditions such as stroke or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis – the neurodegenerative disease that Stephen Hawking was diagnosed with.

Although members of the same laboratory had previously managed to decipher speech – and even silently imagined words – from brain recordings, “in general, all of these reconstruction attempts have had a robotic quality”, said Prof Robert Knight, a neurologist at the University of California in Berkeley, US, who conducted the study with the postdoctoral fellow Ludovic Bellier.

It contains a much bigger spectrum of things than limited phonemes in whatever language, that could add another dimension to an implantable speech decoder.”

The team analysed brain recordings from 29 patients as they were played an approximately three-minute segment of the Pink Floyd song, taken from their 1979 album The Wall.

This year, researchers led by Dr Alexander Huth at the University of Texas in Austin announced that they had managed to translate brain activity into a continuous stream of text using non-invasive MRI scan data.