Music Information Retrieval from Neurological Signals: Towards Neural Population Codes for Music

Much of music neuroscience research has focused on finding functionally specific brain re-gions, often employing highly controlled stimuli. Recent results in computational neuroscience suggest that auditory information is represented in distributed, overlapping patterns in the brain [4] and that natural sounds may be optimal for studying the functional architecture of higher order auditory areas [3]. With this in mind, the goal of the present work was to decode musical informa-tion from brain activity collected during naturalistic music listening. We used multivariate pattern analysis and music information retrieval (MIR) techniques to evaluate the extent to which various musical features could be predicted from hemodynamic and electrical brain activity.