Music is part of the cultural practice and, at the same time, is interwoven with biology through its effects on the brain and its likely evolutionary origin. Studies on music, however, are traditionally based on the humanities and often carried out in a purely historical context, without much input from neuroscience and biology. Here, we argue that lullabies are a particularly suited test case to study the biological versus cultural aspects of music.
This paper describes the development and testing of a brain-computer musical interface (BCMI) that allows a user to select and transform one element of a musical texture by paying attention to that particular element. In order to realize the BCMI system mentioned, a comprehensive testing scheme was established which uses auditory evoked potentials to elicit P300 waves via averaging various types of stimuli. Resented sound stimuli were divided into multi-channel speaker setups to have better localization of user-focused sound stimuli. A sound synthesis model was developed for transforming its sound texture based on neural oscillations that were categorized with the help of a self-organizing map algorithm. In addition, an artificial neural network was used to predict the possible P300 waves that show the attentional focus of a subject. Most of the P300 waves were classified successfully for most of the participants. Promising results were achieved concerning the developed BCMI system. A neural network model was also utilized to predict the possible P300 waves, which show the subject's selective attention. The majority of the participants were able to correctly classify P300 waves. The proposed BCMI system yielded promising results.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.