Musical brain reading sheds light on neural processing of music.
Finnish and Danish researchers have developed a new method that performs decoding or brain reading during continuous listening to real music. Based on the recorded brain reactions, the method predicts how certain functions related to the tone color and rhythm of the music change over time and recognize which piece of music is listened to. The method also makes it possible to point out the areas in the brain that are most crucial for music processing.Â
Musical Brain Reading
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the research team of the Finnish Center of Excellence in Interdisciplinary Music Research in the Universities of Jyväskylä and Helsinki, and the Center for Functional Integrative Neurosciences at the University of Aarhus, recorded participants' brain reactions, while listening to a 16-minute excerpt from the Beatles' album Abbey Road. After that, they used computation algorithms to extract a collection of musical features from the music recording. They then used a collection of machine learning methods to train a computer model that predicts how the characteristics of the music change over time. Finally, they develop a classifier that predicts what part of the music the participant was listening to.
