Neuroscience, music link explored at IIIT-Hyderabad

Hyderabad: Musicology, the scholarly study of music, is rarely found especially in India. 

The study involves music therapy and well-being among others, says Professor Petri Toiviainen, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. 

Link between neuroscience and music was explored at the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad on Friday. Encoding and decoding are the two main approaches for modelling neuroimaging data. 

Professor Petri Toiviainen says, “Encoding predicts brain activity from stimulus while decoding does the opposite by using brain activity to predict information about stimulus.”

He further said that decoding is being widely used in the field of musicology however, there are a lot of challenges to unravelling brain image data. Hence, there is a need of more research on the same. 

Changes in neural activations can be observed to understand the neural processing of musical features. Musical therapy is said to help one’s memory and also have therapeutic effects. Decoding is generally done using Signal Processing and Machine learning.