MUSIC & BRAIN

While studying Electrical Engineering in Greece, I had the opportunity to dive myself into the fascinating field of Brain and Music studies, or as also known Cognitive Neuroscience of Music. 

 

This field of science studies the brain mechanisms in relation to music and electrical engineering knowledge is used to develop the different brain imaging techniques. 

 

For my Master's thesis, I decided to examine how the human brain responds to different musical compositions and what types of emotions are induced by them. Moreover, I examined how brain perceives time and frequency and consequently, tones, their duration and time intervals between them.

 

To this end, I carried out a series of Electroencephalography (EEG) experiments together with the Psychophysiology laboratory of the Medical School of Athens so as to investigae how different musical stimuli would affect the brain waves.

 

The results showed that consonant musical stimuli were associated mostly with pleasant emotions, while in the case of dissonant musical stimuli different areas of the brain were activated and brain frequencies associated with unpleasant emotions were detected.

 

Thesis report