NEURAL TRACKING OF SIMPLE AND COMPLEX RHYTHMS : PILOT STUDY AND DATASET

A better understanding of how humans process musical beat has the potential to inform Music Information Retrieval systems. We carried out a pilot study with the aim of eventually extracting beat-related information from EEG responses to music—specifically, excerpts from Bollywood songs and reductions of various rhythm types represented therein. In addition to recording cortical activations using EEG, we also collected perceptual ratings reflecting enjoyment and perceived rhythmic complexity of the stimuli. Here we describe the experimental design and present preliminary analyses of the perceptual ratings. Finally, the EEG data have been made publicly available in Matlab format.