Brain to Music: Musical Representation from Stress-Induced EEG

The prolonged COVID-19 pandemic is making the social problem of stress-induced depression even more serious. This so-called the Coronavirus Blues has been bringing high level of stress to many people and in turn they are suffering worse and worse changes in their daily lives. This study is designed to resolve these social problems. It aims to represent stress states musically by use of stress-induced EEG features known to be highly correlated to stress, and also attempts to intuitively show whether stress is relieved by scent therapy through changes in musical expression of brain signals. The theta/alpha enhancement protocol is utilized to generate music from stress-evoked EEG features. Four subjects (19~24 age, all right-handed) participated in the experiment. Their stress levels measured by the cognitive stress scale-14(PSS-14) before and after the experiment. While measuring their EEG data in stress or non-stress condition, music is generated in line with their stress states. The results showed that music changed from slow tempo and calm mood toward faster and louder, while the brain state transits from normal to stress by stimulation inducing stress and subject becomes deeper in stress. During aromatherapy in stress condition, there was no noticeable change in music as compared with stress condition. Nevertheless, all participants show lower stress scores after aromatherapy and two subjects has gained higher theta/alpha ratio during aromatherapy. This is because aromatherapy for stress alleviation is considered to be highly inter-subjective variable or some specific subjects are still exposed to stress in spite of sufficient scent to them. Thus, we expect that sometime after stress condition, aromatherapy could mitigate stress and music could be returned to normal state.