Decoding Music Attention from “EEG headphones”: a User-friendly Auditory Brain-computer Interface

Listening to music is a joyful way to relax. Many people enjoy playing music in the background in their daily life, even while working. This makes music an excellent choice as a stimulus for building a user-friendly auditory brain-computer interface. In this study, we designed a new brain-computer interface system using music as the stimuli, and recorded brain signals from Smartfones, an EEG recording device integrated into a pair of headphones. We spatialized musical instruments, and asked the participants to pay attention to either the vibraphone on the left or the piano on the right. Then, we used a stimulus reconstruction method to decode attention from EEG signals. Results show that the proposed system can achieve good decoding accuracy on top of its superior user-friendliness compared to EEG caps. These results suggest the viability of using music in designing future auditory brain-computer interfaces.