The power of music: impact on EEG signals

Music is known to impact attentional state without conscious awareness. Listening to music encourages the brain to secrete neurotransmitters improving cognition and emotion.

Analysis of QEEG band width while listening to two music types, identifying different cortical areas activated and which genre has a similar effect to relaxed EEG.

This is a cross-section interventional analytic study including 76 normal subjects, 55 of them are females (72.37%). Participants listened to 10 min of a single audio track during EEG recording, consisting of (1 min of silence, 3 min of Egyptian folk music, 3 min of silence, then 3 min of Egyptian instrumental classic music (without any lyrics). We analyzed QEEG bands at each brain region during different tracks. The power ratio index (PRI) was calculated for each region, and then the interhemispheric difference was compared.

The participants' ages ranged from 15 to 26 with a mean 16.73 ± 2.37 years. PRI showed a significant increase in the frontal and occipital regions during listening to folk music compared to the silent epoch, where p < 0.001 and p = 0.023, respectively. In the frontal and temporal regions, the classic music epoch evoked the highest PRI interhemispheric difference compared to the folk music epoch, where p = 0.004 and p < 0.001, respectively.

Egyptian folk music has significantly slowed the brain rhythm, particularly in the frontal region, compared to classic music, supporting the hypothesis of a momentary reduction of cognitive capacities by the noise. Classic music was evidently associated with a relaxed state EEG.