Impact of Familiar and Unfamiliar Music on Brain Network Reconfigurations

Poster Session B - Sunday, April 14, 2024, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Sheraton Hall ABC

Sydney Yeung¹ (sydneyyeung1@gmail.com), Karen Liu¹, Johan Nakuci², Kanika Bansal^2,3; ¹Student Research Accelerator, ²US DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory, Maryland, USA, ³Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Maryland, USA

Music is a powerful influencer of mood, cognition, and overall mental well-being, contributing to network reconfigurations that underscore its impact on cognitive processes. This study aims to explore how brain networks reconfigure while listening to music that varies in properties such as genre, pace, and familiarity. We analyzed a publicly available dataset where EEG from twenty participants was recorded as they engaged in listening to twelve songs from different genres and scored familiarity and enjoyment. We filtered the EEG into Delta, Theta, Alpha, and Beta bands and divided each song into early, middle, and late time blocks to identify the temporal sequence of music-driven changes. To assess network reconfigurations following music exposure, as a function of familiarity and enjoyment, we estimated functional brain connectivity using weighted phase lag index (wPLI) and extracted several features of the connectivity matrices within each time block and frequency band. Our initial findings indicate that the most significant changes arise during the middle time block where we observed higher network connectivity in the Delta and Theta frequency bands for less familiar music. Simultaneously, we observed a reduction in modularity—the tendency of networks to separate into distinct modules with high connectivity within and low connectivity between. We propose that these changes in network properties indicate brain network reconfigurations triggered by the unfamiliarity of music and may be utilized in therapeutic interventions. In our ongoing research, we investigate network reconfigurations, focusing on their spatial localization, to further understand how music familiarity impacts brain connectivity and dynamics.

Topic Area: ATTENTION: Auditory