Asena Akkaya

Title: Investigating objective neural indices of music understanding

Supervision Team: Giovanni Di Liberto, TCD / Shirley Coyle, DCU

Description: Music is ubiquitous in our daily life. Yet it remains unclear how our brains make a sense of complex music sounds, leading to music enjoyment, contributing to the regulation of mood, anxiety, pain, and perceived exertion during exercise. A recent methodological breakthrough demonstrated that brain electrical signals recorded with electroencephalography (EEG) during music listening reflect the listener’s attempt to predict upcoming sounds. This project aims to identify objective metrics of music processing based on EEG, pupillometry and other sensing modalities in progressively more ecologically-valid settings. The project will culminate in the realisation of a brain-computer interface that informs us on the level of music “understanding” in real-time. In doing so, the project will offer a new methodology with various potential applications in brain health research (e.g., hearing-impairment, dementia, anxiety disorders).