Detrended Fluctuation and Power Spectral Analysis of alpha and delta EEG brain rhythms to study music elicited emotion

The study reports the effect of two different types of Hindustani music which are supposed to evoke contrasting emotions on brain activity using Electroencephalography (EEG) data. Two different sets of Hindustani music raga clips of contrasting emotion (romantic/sorrow) were used in the study. EEG was performed on five male subjects while they listened to the clips. The linear analysis of their alpha and delta spectral power showed that in most cases arousal based activities were enhanced in both the subjects while they listened to the two music clips. Further, we used a robust nonlinear method called Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (DFA) to analyze the scaling behavior of the observed fluctuations in EEG. The scaling exponent (α) values determined for the different experimental conditions show different levels of neural activity when the two different types of music are played. The implications are discussed in detail.