Familiarity Affects Entrainment of EEG in Music Listening

Abstract

Music perception involves complex brain functions. The relationship between music and brain such as cortical entrainment to periodic tune, periodic beat, and music have been well investigated. It has also been reported that the cerebral cortex responded more strongly to the periodic rhythm of unfamiliar music than to that of familiar music. However, previous works mainly used simple and artificial auditory stimuli like pure tone or beep. It is still unclear how the brain response is influenced by the familiarity of music. To address this issue, we analyzed electroencelphalogram (EEG) to investigate the relationship between cortical response and familiarity of music using melodies produced by piano sounds as simple natural stimuli. The cross-correlation function averaged across trials, channels, and participants showed two pronounced peaks at time lags around 70 and 140 ms. At the two peaks the magnitude of the cross-correlation values were significantly larger when listening to unfamiliar and scrambled music compared to those when listening to familiar music. Our findings suggest that the response to unfamiliar music is stronger than that to familiar music. One potential application of our findings would be the discrimination of listeners' familiarity with music, which provides an important tool for assessment of brain activity.

Music Familiarity Affects EEG Entrainment When Little Attention Is Paid

“…Meltzer et al ( 2015 ) reported that the cerebral cortex induced a stronger response to the periodic rhythm of unfamiliar music than to that of familiar music. Furthermore, in a previous study, we reported a stronger response to unfamiliar music than to familiar music (Kumagai et al, 2017 ). Familiarity has also been studied extensively in research on visual perception.…”

Classification of familiarity based on cross-correlation features between EEG and music

“…Our previous work [22] showed that the cross-correlation function averaged across trials, channels, and participants, showed a pronounced peak. At the peak, the cross-correlation magnitudes while participants listening to unfamiliar and scrambled music were significantly larger than they were while listening to familiar music [22].…”

“…Moreover, cortical entrainment to the envelope of speech can be seen even at the single-trial level [19], [20]. Cortical entrainment to the music has also been demonstrated in terms of music perception [21], [22].…”

“…The EEG data used in this study were collected in our previous work [22]. In order to classify familiarity, we used a subset of the data, that is, the trials labeled familiar and unfamiliar.…”

“…At the peak, the cross-correlation magnitudes while participants listening to unfamiliar and scrambled music were significantly larger than they were while listening to familiar music [22]. In this paper, we considered the cross-correlation values between EEG and music envelope for each channel as potential features for classification.…”