A Consumer BCI for Automated Music Evaluation Within a Popular On-Demand Music Streaming Service - Taking Listener's Brainwaves to Extremes
This work addresses the need for automated music annotation in on-demand streaming services, offering a potential tool for personalized recommendations, though it appears incremental by building on established neuroscientific concepts and existing methods.
The researchers tackled the problem of automatically rating music based on listeners' brainwave data using commercial EEG devices, achieving encouraging results through a two-stage machine learning approach that combines generic feature engineering with personalized extreme learning machines.
We investigated the possibility of using a machine-learning scheme in conjunction with commercial wearable EEG-devices for translating listener's subjective experience of music into scores that can be used for the automated annotation of music in popular on-demand streaming services. Based on the established -neuroscientifically sound- concepts of brainwave frequency bands, activation asymmetry index and cross-frequency-coupling (CFC), we introduce a Brain Computer Interface (BCI) system that automatically assigns a rating score to the listened song. Our research operated in two distinct stages: i) a generic feature engineering stage, in which features from signal-analytics were ranked and selected based on their ability to associate music induced perturbations in brainwaves with listener's appraisal of music. ii) a personalization stage, during which the efficiency of ex- treme learning machines (ELMs) is exploited so as to translate the derived pat- terns into a listener's score. Encouraging experimental results, from a pragmatic use of the system, are presented.