Mobile EEG recordings of musical (jazz) improvisation

EXPERIMENT INFORMATION

The experimental methods were approved by the Institutional Review Board of the University of Houston, and are in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. All participants provided written informed consent, including agreement for publication in online open-access publication of information obtained during the experiments such as data, images, audio, and video. Three male healthy adults (P1, P2 and P3) volunteered for this study. Musicians P2 and P3 received (formal) musical instruction for 12 and 6 years respectively, and P1 (informal) for 6 years. To the date of the experiments, P1, P2 and P3 had 31, 38, and 26 years of experience performing music respectively. The musicians performed jazz improvisation in a public event at the Student Center of the University of Houston while wearing Mobile Brain-Body Imaging technology. Musicians P1 and P2 have a jazz musical background, whereas P3 had a ’classical music’ education. Musician P1 played the drums, musician P2 played the saxophone, and P3 played using a soprano saxophone.

DATA SUMMARY

The EEG data are in .MAT format and are archived in folders and subfolders, divided in two recording blocks for three participants. The two blocks include EEG and EOG signals from three musicians, performing three 15-minute improvisations (Trials). Data transmission was interrupted from 4:25 - 5:25 of Trial 3 due to a loss in connection, which happened between the end of Block 1 and the start of Block 2. All EEG files are named with the following naming convention:

Block(block #)_P(participant #)_.mat,

specifying the recording block number (1, 2) and the participant number (1, 2, 3).

Each of the EEG files contains a structure with three fields (variable name: EEG):

• EEG.data: M×N matrix containing the raw EEG data. The rows are the M channels corresponding to the channel locations and the columns are the N sample points. EOG data is provided in the same structure for four channels in rows 17 (right temple), 22 (left temple), 28 (above the right eye) and 32 (below the right eye)
• EEG.srate: The sampling rate of the system given in samples/second (Hz)
• EEG.chanlocs: M dimensional structure where each dimension corresponds to the location information for each of the M channels
• EEG.gender: Gender of subject (M: male; F: female)
• EEG.events: Provides annotations about the performances such as times (in samples) of Trials, Eyes Open and Eyes Closed sections.

Additional data includes:

• Audio: An mp3 file (ZOOM0001.mp3) contains a sound recording from the three 15-minute Trials.
• Videos: Two video recordings (Blaffer_Floor_1210.mp4 and Blaffer_Floor_1221.mp4) are included in the database.
• Impedances: An Excel file (Impedances.xlsx) contains Impedance values for all EEG electrodes, before and after the recordings, for all participants in the experiments.
• Additional Notes: An Excel file (Performance Notes.xlsx) includes notes made by three independent raters (music experts) about each of the performances. The table includes times which can be used to synchronize EEG data and sound recordings, together with annotations from EEG.events.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

Authors would like to thank Woody Witt, Guillermo “Memo” Reza, and Dan Gelok for their contributions to the study providing the data.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.