Music and the Brain symposium held at IIIT-Hyderabad

Experts explain the music and its relation with human brain

Hyderabad, March 18: Experts from across the globe have explained the research and analysis of music and its impact on human brains during a symposium ‘Music and the Brain’ held at IIIT-Hyderabad on Friday.

Prof. Petri Toiviainen, Dr. Suvi Saarikallio and Dr. Vinoo Alluri from University of Jyväskylä, Finland visited Cognitive Science Lab (CSL), IIIT Hyderabad and participated in the symposium on "Music and the Brain" organized jointly by CSL and Kohli Centre on Intelligent Systems.

Dr. Suvi Saarikallio in her talk tiled "Music and Emotion: Overview of methods" emphasized the challenges faced in devising experiments investigating music and hos it is related to human emotion. She has focused on what emotions such as sadness, calmness, anger, happiness that music is capable of expressing with its arrangement of various musical features such as timbre, tone, scale, etc. Also, she dwelt on what kind of emotions are subjectively experienced by listening to music.

In his talk on "Music Information Retrieval (MIR): Methods and Tools", Prof.  Petri Toiviainen gave an introduction to the research domain of Music Information Retrieval (MIR) that attempts to develop computational methods for organization, search, retrieval, classification, recommendation, browsing of musical information. He also elaborated on methods for content-based MIR, sound and music computing.

He introduced features of and capabilities of the MIR toolbox (Matlab based) that they developed to extract features from music signal at multiple levels, from low level features of the music signal to higher abstract features such as pitch clarity that attempt to unravel the meaning of music. He gave demos of work on musical tonality modelling using self-organizing maps and multivariate modeling of perceived emotion in music.

Dr. Vinoo Alluri focused on functional brain imaging experiments that reveal the neural correlates of music in humans while they are listening to music pieces. She dwelt on the methodological challenges faced by using naturalistic music stimuli such as music pieces from popular musicians as opposed to the current research practice of using controlled music stimuli. She elaborated on the new paradigm they developed and the mathematical approaches for analyzing such brain imaging data. Recent studies they performed using this paradigm involving encoding and decoding approaches were discussed. 

This novel paradigm was employed to examine differences between musicians and non-musicians in whole-brain functional connectivity and limbic system-related connectivity patterns while listening to music. The paradigm seems promising to understand brain networks enaged while participants are listening to music and experience the resulting emotional state.