Music is something we all come into contact with. It plays an important role in our lives. Many of us have an enormous quantity of music on our computers, music players or phone and we spend hours listening, downloading and grouping music. When feeling a certain way, or when placed in a certain situation we have a tendency to listen to a specific type of music. For example the music that we play differs on the state of our mood or emotion. However, the combination of music and mood may vary from person to person. Searching for the right song at the right time can take forever and be very annoying.

However, computers do not have the ability to differentiate music in categories, the way that humans can. Therefore, we want to use  EEG to see if there is a correlation between a certain brainwave pattern and the type of music played, and if this information can be used to create appropriate music playlists.

Research Question:

Is a computer capable of grouping various kinds of music based on brain wave pattern similarities found when listening to the individual songs. We expect we will not be able to distinguish between songs with only small differences. We expect, however, to find differences between genres should be distinguishable.

 It would also be interesting to observe the effect of the familiarity of a song or piece of music.We expect there to be a difference in reaction to a familiar song as opposed to an unfamiliar song. We also doubt that we will be able to distinguish between songs with only small differences, although differences between genres should be distinguishable. 

The final report of our group can be see here:

http://staff.science.uva.nl/~ghebreab/ICC2010/FacetoFace.pdf

The final presentation is included in the attachment below