Emotion specification from musical stimuli: An EEG study with AFA and DFA

The present study reports interesting findings in regard to emotional arousal based activities while listening to two Hindustani classical ragas of contrast emotion. EEG data was taken on 5 naïve listeners while they listened to two ragas - Bahar and Mia ki Malhar which are conventionally known to portray contrast emotions. The EEG data were analyzed with the help of two robust non-linear tools viz. Adaptive Fractal Analysis (AFA) and Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (DFA). A comparative study of the Hurst Exponents obtained from the two methods have been shown which shows that DFA provides more rigorous results compared to AFA when it comes to the scaling analysis of bio-signal data. The results and implications have been discussed in detail.