AI can examine brain activity to ID the music in your ears

The sound of music can speak to one's soul in myriad ways and evidently is also true in regards how listening to different musical genres impact the brain. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data and computational algorithms were used in new research published in Scientific Reports on Feb. 2 to demonstrate that music genre can be identified through observing neurological responses to certain characteristics associated with that particular genre. "Our approach was capable of identifying musical pieces with improving accuracy across time and spatial coverage," said lead researcher Sebastian Hoefle, a doctoral candidate at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. "Specifically, we showed that the distributed information in auditory cortices and the entropy of musical pieces enhanced overall identification accuracy up to 95 percent." Researchers investigated fMRI brain responses of six participants who listened to 40 musical pieces of various genres, including rock, pop, jazz, classical and folk without lyrics.