Gestalt Phenomenon in Music? A Neurocognitive Physics Study with EEG

TL;DR

This study investigates how different musical frequency bands influence human brain activity using EEG, revealing frequency-specific neural responses that could inform cognitive music therapy.

Contribution

It introduces a novel neurocognitive approach combining wavelet transform and multifractal analysis to study brain responses to musical frequencies.

Findings

Frequency-specific arousal responses in brain lobes and EEG bands.

Distinct multifractal spectral widths linked to musical frequency bands.

Potential applications in cognitive music therapy.

Abstract

The term gestalt has been widely used in the field of psychology which defined the perception of human mind to group any object not in part but as a unified whole. Music in general is polytonic i.e. a combination of a number of pure tones (frequencies) mixed together in a manner that sounds harmonius. The study of human brain response due to different frequency groups of acoustic signal can give us an excellent insight regarding the neural and functional architecture of brain functions. In this work we have tried to analyze the effect of different frequency bands of music on the various frequency rhythms of human brain obtained from EEG data of 5 participants. Four (4) widely popular Rabindrasangeet clips were subjected to Wavelet Transform method for extracting five resonant frequency bands from the original music signal. These resonant frequency bands were presented to the subjects as auditory stimulus and EEG signals recorded simultaneously in 19 different locations of the brain. The recorded EEG signals were noise cleaned and subjected to Multifractal Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (MFDFA) technique on the alpha, theta and gamma frequency range. Thus, we obtained the complexity values (in the form of multifractal spectral width) in alpha, theta and gamma EEG rhythms corresponding to different frequency bands of music. We obtain frequency specific arousal based response in different lobes of brain as well as in specific EEG bands corresponding to musical stimuli. This revelation can be of immense importance when it comes to the field of cognitive music therapy.