A new proof-of-concept study published in the journal eNeuro demonstrates that researchers can successfully trace the contour of an imagined melody by decoding brain activity. By analyzing intracranial brain signals from ten epilepsy patients who silently imagined familiar children’s songs, the team from South Korea found that the brain maps musical structures using relative pitch—the up-and-down relationships between notes—rather than absolute frequencies. While individual note classification was modest at 26.7% accuracy, stringing the decoded notes together effectively reconstructed the overall rise, fall, and shape of the original melodies. Driven primarily by sound-processing and motor regions of the brain, this exploratory research could eventually pave the way for advanced tools that help individuals who cannot articulate speech reconstruct their internally generated music.