Investigating Brain Activity when Listening to Different Types of Music by Near-Infrared Spectroscopy

Music plays an important role in our daily lives. Thus, there are many studies about musical effects on brain. In this research, we tried to investigate the responding of cerebral cortex to different types of music and the effects of emotion when listening to music. There were 5 subjects listening to 3 musical categories: Rock, Classic and Vietnamese folk song. All experiments were measured by near-infrared spectroscopy, and data was analyzed by Matlab® (MathWorks, Natick, MA) and SPSS® (SPSS inc., IBM) software. Our results showed that there was obvious decrease in HbO when listening to rock music more than listening to classical or Vietnamese folk one. In addition, the differences among subjects' emotional levels were not statistically significant, although the more they enjoyed the song, the lower the averaged area under curve of oxygenated hemoglobin was.