Measuring and classifying musical engagement using EEG and motion capture

Abstract

Currently little is known about the brain dynamics and expressive movements that support musical engagement. Here we applied the MoBI (Mobile Brain/Body Imaging) paradigm [1], using EEG and motion capture to study musical engagement through expressive gesture. We trained expert and non-expert participants to communicate the feeling of music as they hear it by varying expressive details of simple rhythmic U-shaped hand/arm ‘conducting' gestures. During half of the trials, the participants completed a challenging non-rhythmic arithmetic task, creating a ‘Less Engaged’ condition in contrast to the single-task ‘Engaged’ expressive movement condition. EXPERIMENT METHOD