Gestalt Phenomenon in Music? A Neurocognitive Physics Study with EEG
This work addresses the problem of understanding neural responses to music for potential applications in cognitive music therapy, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a specific domain.
The study analyzed how different frequency bands of music affect brain rhythms using EEG data from 5 participants, finding frequency-specific arousal responses in various brain lobes and EEG bands, which could be important for cognitive music therapy.
The term gestalt has been widely used in the field of psychology which defined the perception of human mind to group any object not in part but as a unified whole. Music in general is polytonic i.e. a combination of a number of pure tones (frequencies) mixed together in a manner that sounds harmonius. The study of human brain response due to different frequency groups of acoustic signal can give us an excellent insight regarding the neural and functional architecture of brain functions. In this work we have tried to analyze the effect of different frequency bands of music on the various frequency rhythms of human brain obtained from EEG data of 5 participants. Four (4) widely popular Rabindrasangeet clips were subjected to Wavelet Transform method for extracting five resonant frequency bands from the original music signal. These resonant frequency bands were presented to the subjects as auditory stimulus and EEG signals recorded simultaneously in 19 different locations of the brain. The recorded EEG signals were noise cleaned and subjected to Multifractal Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (MFDFA) technique on the alpha, theta and gamma frequency range. Thus, we obtained the complexity values (in the form of multifractal spectral width) in alpha, theta and gamma EEG rhythms corresponding to different frequency bands of music. We obtain frequency specific arousal based response in different lobes of brain as well as in specific EEG bands corresponding to musical stimuli. This revelation can be of immense importance when it comes to the field of cognitive music therapy.