EEG-Based Decoding of Musical Mode and Melodic Direction Using Empirical Mode Decomposition

Abstract

Electroencephalography (EEG) has proven to be a powerful tool for decoding neural activity in real-life scenarios, including the perception and processing of emotions elicited by music. Among the various musical features that modulate these responses, musical mode and melodic direction (or contour) play a central role. This work proposes a novel EEG feature extraction framework based on Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) to decompose EEG signals recorded during active piano performance for the detection of these two musical features. Energy-based descriptors were computed from the first four Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs) obtained through EMD and used to train a Wide Neural Network classifier. The model performance was benchmarked against several standard classifiers commonly employed in EEG classification tasks. Two experimental scenarios were explored: intra-subject and intersubject. In the former case, the proposed framework achieved average accuracies of 84%, whereas in the inter-subject case, accuracies reached 81% on average using the first IMF, with AUC-ROC values of 0.9 on average in both cases. A frequency-domain analysis revealed a strong correspondence between the IMFs and conventional EEG sub-bands, except for certain specific frequency components that were not fully represented. Predominant activations were observed over the frontal, temporal, and parietooccipital regions, areas consistently associated with music processing. Furthermore, the proposed method demonstrated robustness to handedness, successfully classifying EEG data across participants regardless of their dominant hand. These findings highlight the potential of EMD-based feature extraction for identifying music-related neural patterns and contribute to advancing research in Music Information Retrieval (MIR), affective neuroscience, and the broader understanding of the neural encoding of musical structure.