Subjective reactions to music and brainwave rhythms

Abstract

The relationship between subjective reactions to music and EEG frequencies over left and right occipital sites was studied in groups of musicians and nonmusicians. Self-reports of attentiveness during music listening, familiarity with the music, and emotional reactions to the music all correlated moderately to substantially with various EEG frequency measures. The majority of significant correlations were between self-reports and direct measures of EEG activity in the slower theta and delta bands, while music minus silence EEG measures in the alpha and beta bands provided superior correlates of subjective reactions. These results suggest that EEG techniques may be useful in increasing understanding of brain mechanisms associated with music perception, and that it may prove to be ultimately possible to account for sizable segments of the variance of aesthetic reactions to musical stimuli in terms of EEG measures of brain activity. © 1977, Psychonomic Society, Inc.. All rights reserved.