Real-time Measures for Brain Activity Detection to Live Indian Classical Music Stimulus

Numerous studies have explored the intriguing relationship between music and the brain, providing compelling evidence that listening to music has a profound impact on brain activity and stimulation. These investigations have uncovered intricate details about how the brain processes and responds to music, leading to a more nuanced understanding of the intricate relationship between music and the human brain. Despite extensive research on the subject, there remains a gap in our understanding of the specific effects of Indian classical music (ICM) as well as its therapeutic applications. This study proposes a real-time energy and distance measures for determining the brain areas that are activated by live ICM, while simultaneously accounting for musical impulse and EEG response uncertainty. For this, the authors used recursive Mahalanobis distance and energy measurements by finding recursive covariance matrix. Focusing on the Hindustani classical music (HCM) form of ICM, this study uses two chosen ragas with similar ascending-descending structure but differing in two normal and flat notes: Yaman and Puria Dhanashree (PD). Two of the volunteers involved in this study had prior musical knowledge on ICM and three had none. To precisely collect brain responses from different parts of brain regions, authors used a 24-channel electroencephalogram (EEG) cap to record brain responses. The results of this work show that different brain regions will get activated for different ragas. The listener’s knowledge on ICM also affects the regions of brain evoked. For the volunteer with knowledge in HCM, parieto-occipital region is evoked for both ragas. The one with carnatic music knowledge has more right temporal activation for both the ragas and the volunteers with no musical knowledge showed more activation in parieto-occipital region for PD. In summary, the relationship between music and the brain has the capacity to enhance mental productivity, induce relaxation, and contribute to both mental and physical well-being.