EEG Blink Artifacts Can Identify Read Music in Listening and Imagery
Abhinav Uppal, Dillan Cellier, Min Suk Lee, Sean Bauersfeld, Yuchen Xu, Shihab A. Shamma, Gert Cauwenberghs, Virginia R. de Sa

TL;DR
This study demonstrates that eye blink patterns recorded via EEG can be used to identify the specific music a person is reading or imagining, revealing a novel link between eye movements and cognitive music processing.
Contribution
It introduces a method to decode music reading and imagery from blink timing in EEG data, highlighting the informational value of eye artifacts in cognitive studies.
Findings
Blink patterns can identify music reading with above chance accuracy.
Accuracy varies with subject, condition, and timing parameters.
Eye blinks may be useful in wearable brain decoding devices.
Abstract
Eye-movement related artifacts including blinks and saccades are significantly larger in amplitude than cortical activity as recorded by scalp electroencephalography (EEG), but are typically discarded in EEG studies focusing on cognitive mechanisms as explained by cortical source activity. Accumulating evidence however indicates that spontaneous eye blinks are not necessarily random, and can be modulated by attention and cognition beyond just physiological necessities. In this exploratory analysis we reanalyze a public EEG dataset of musicians listening to or imagining music (Bach chorales) while simultaneously reading from a sheet of music. We ask whether blink timing in reading music, accompanied by listening or imagery, is sufficient to uniquely identify the music being read from a given score. Intra-subject blink counts and timing are compared across trials using a spike train…
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