Investigation into the effects of music and meditation on galvanic skin response

Abstract

Music and meditation are nowadays commonly used as relaxation techniques. Meditation is known to have an effect on the mental state of practitioners. It is considered to have stress-reducing capabilities. Similarly, music is believed to make a disturbed mind calm and relieved. It is used as a therapeutic agent in some countries. In this work, the authors use music and meditation as stimuli in psychophysiological experiments using galvanic skin response (GSR) as an objective method to estimate the emotional response of subjects. Results show that GSR can be used as a measure of subjective mental states during music appreciation. The effect of music on GSR is compared with that of meditation. A time-series model is developed for the response.