Revealing Preference in Popular Music Through Familiarity and Brain Response

Music preference was reported as a factor, which could elicit innermost music emotion, entailing accurate ground-truth data and music therapy efficiency. This study executes statistical analysis to investigate the distinction of music preference through familiarity scores, response times (response rates), and brain response (EEG). Twenty participants did self-assessment after listening to two types of popular music’s chorus section: music without lyrics (Melody) and music with lyrics (Song). We then conduct a music preference classification using a support vector machine, random forest, and k-nearest neighbors with the familiarity scores, the response rates, and EEG as the feature vectors. The statistical analysis and F1-score of EEG are congruent, which says that the brain’s right side outperformed its left side in classification performance. Finally, these behavioral and brain studies support that preference, familiarity, and response rates can contribute to the music emotion experiment’s design to understand music, emotion, and listener. Not only to the music industry, the biomedical and healthcare industry can also exploit this experiment to collect data from patients to improve the efficiency of healing by music.