Exploring the correlation between the type of music and the emotions evoked: A study using subjective questionnaires and EEG
Jelizaveta Jankowska, Bożena Kostek, Fernando Alonso-Fernandez, Prayag Tiwari
TL;DR
This study investigates how listening to different music genres shapes human emotions and corresponding brain activity. It combines subjective questionnaires based on the GEMS framework with 32-channel EEG measurements while participants listened to calm-inducing classical and tense-inducing electronic fragments, using the Emotify dataset for stimulus selection. Key findings show classical music evoking calm, low-arousal emotions with increased theta/alpha activity and reduced frontal delta tension, whereas electronic music elicited higher arousal and more intense emotions with elevated delta, beta, and gamma activity. The work links self-reported affect to neural signals and points to future directions for automatic emotion classification from EEG with broader genre coverage and larger, more diverse participant samples.
Abstract
The subject of this work is to check how different types of music affect human emotions. While listening to music, a subjective survey and brain activity measurements were carried out using an EEG helmet. The aim is to demonstrate the impact of different music genres on emotions. The research involved a diverse group of participants of different gender and musical preferences. This had the effect of capturing a wide range of emotional responses to music. After the experiment, a relationship analysis of the respondents' questionnaires with EEG signals was performed. The analysis revealed connections between emotions and observed brain activity.