Analysis and recognition of a novel experimental paradigm for musical emotion brain-computer interface

Musical emotions have received increasing attention over the years. To better recognize the emotions by brain-computer interface (BCI), the random music-playing and sequential music-playing experimental paradigms are proposed and compared in this paper. Two experimental paradigms consist of three positive pieces, three neutral pieces and three negative pieces of music. Ten subjects participate in two experimental paradigms. The features of electroencephalography (EEG) signals are firstly analyzed in the time, frequency and spatial domains. To improve the effect of emotion recognition, a recognition model is proposed with the optimal channels selecting by Pearson's correlation coefficient, and the feature fusion combining differential entropy and wavelet packet energy. According to the analysis results, the features of sequential music-playing experimental paradigm are more different among three emotions. The classification results of sequential music-playing experimental paradigm are also better, and its average results of positive, neutral and negative emotions are 78.53%, 72.81% and 77.35%, respectively. The more obvious the changes of EEG induced by the emotions, the higher the classification accuracy will be. After analyzing two experimental paradigms, a better way for music to induce the emotions can be explored. Therefore, our research offers a novel perspective on affective BCIs.