Although emotion detection using electroencephalogram (EEG) data has become a highly active area of research over the last decades, little attention has been paid to stimulus familiarity, a crucial subjectivity issue. Using both our experimental data and a sophisticated database (DEAP dataset), we investigated the effects of familiarity on brain activity based on EEG signals. Focusing on familiarity studies, we allowed subjects to select the same number of familiar and unfamiliar songs; both resulting datasets demonstrated the importance of reporting self-emotion based on the assumption that the emotional state when experiencing music is subjective. We found evidence that music familiarity influences both the power spectra of brainwaves and the brain functional connectivity to a certain level. We conducted an additional experiment using music familiarity in an attempt to recognize emotional states; our empirical results suggested that the use of only songs with low familiarity levels can enhance the performance of EEG-based emotion classification systems that adopt fractal dimension or power spectral density features and support vector machine, multilayer perceptron or C4.5 classifier. This suggests that unfamiliar songs are most appropriate for the construction of an emotion recognition system.
SUMMARYResearch on emotion recognition using electroencephalogram (EEG) of subjects listening to music has become more active in the past decade. However, previous works did not consider emotional oscillations within a single musical piece. In this research, we propose a continuous music-emotion recognition approach based on brainwave signals. While considering the subject-dependent and changing-over-time characteristics of emotion, our experiment included self-reporting and continuous emotion annotation in the arousal-valence space. Fractal dimension (FD) and power spectral density (PSD) approaches were adopted to extract informative features from raw EEG signals and then we applied emotion classification algorithms to discriminate binary classes of emotion. According to our experimental results, FD slightly outperformed PSD approach both in arousal and valence classification, and FD was found to have the higher correlation with emotion reports than PSD. In addition, continuous emotion recognition during music listening based on EEG was found to be an effective method for tracking emotional reporting oscillations and provides an opportunity to better understand human emotional processes.
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