Type of Music Associated with Relaxation Based on EEG Signal Analysis

Abstract

Music is the science and the art of tones, or the musical sounds. Music is also the art of combining tones in a manner to please the ear. Music therapy is the planned and creative use of music to attain and maintain health and well–being. There are a lot of experimental efforts to understand musical processing in the brain using electroencephalogram (EEG). It is accepted that listening to music increases the theta and alpha bands power that is associated to increase relaxation. In this study, we are interested to find the type of music that can produce such state of mind by analysing the EEG power spectrum in those frequency bands. 4 types of music were investigated, i.e. sound of instrumental piano, sound of wave, sound of birds and sound of nature. As the result, 71.4% of subjects were able to achieved highest power spectral density in theta and alpha frequency bands while listening to sound of instrumental piano and sound of nature while only 28.6–42.9% of subjects were able to produce the same while listening to sound of wave and sound of bird. From the finding, it can be concluded that sound of instrumental piano and sound of nature increase relaxation as indicated by the increase of PSD in the theta/alpha frequency bands compared to the sound of wave and sound of bird.