Musical Emotions Recognition Using Entropy Features and Channel Optimization Based on EEG

The dynamic of music is an important factor to arouse emotional experience, but current research mainly uses short-term artificial stimulus materials, which cannot effectively awaken complex emotions and reflect their dynamic brain response. In this paper, we used three long-term stimulus materials with many dynamic emotions inside: the “Waltz No. 2” containing pleasure and excitement, the “No. 14 Couplets” containing excitement, briskness, and nervousness, and the first movement of “Symphony No. 5 in C minor” containing passion, relaxation, cheerfulness, and nervousness. Approximate entropy (ApEn) and sample entropy (SampEn) were applied to extract the non-linear features of electroencephalogram (EEG) signals under long-term dynamic stimulation, and the K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) method was used to recognize emotions. Further, a supervised feature vector dimensionality reduction method was proposed. Firstly, the optimal channel set for each subject was obtained by using a particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm, and then the number of times to select each channel in the optimal channel set of all subjects was counted. If the number was greater than or equal to the threshold, it was a common channel suitable for all subjects. The recognition results based on the optimal channel set demonstrated that each accuracy of two categories of emotions based on “Waltz No. 2” and three categories of emotions based on “No. 14 Couplets” was generally above 80%, respectively, and the recognition accuracy of four categories based on the first movement of “Symphony No. 5 in C minor” was about 70%. The recognition accuracy based on the common channel set was about 10% lower than that based on the optimal channel set, but not much different from that based on the whole channel set. This result suggested that the common channel could basically reflect the universal features of the whole subjects while realizing feature dimension reduction. The common channels were mainly distributed in the frontal lobe, central region, parietal lobe, occipital lobe, and temporal lobe. The channel number distributed in the frontal lobe was greater than the ones in other regions, indicating that the frontal lobe was the main emotional response region. Brain region topographic map based on the common channel set showed that there were differences in entropy intensity between different brain regions of the same emotion and the same brain region of different emotions. The number of times to select each channel in the optimal channel set of all 30 subjects showed that the principal component channels representing five brain regions were Fp1/F3 in the frontal lobe, CP5 in the central region, Pz in the parietal lobe, O2 in the occipital lobe, and T8 in the temporal lobe, respectively.