A chill brain-music interface for enhancing music chills with personalized playlists

Abstract

Music chills are pleasurable experiences while listening to music, often accompanied by physical responses, such as goosebumps1,2. Enjoying music that induces chills is central to music appreciation, and engages the reward system in the brain3-5. However, the specific songs that trigger chills vary with individual preferences6, and the neural substrates associated with musical rewards differ among individuals7-9, making it challenging to establish a standard method for enhancing music chills. In this study, we developed the Chill Brain-Music Interface (C-BMI), a closed-loop neurofeedback system that uses in-ear electroencephalogram (EEG) for song selection. The C-BMI generates personalized playlists aimed at evoking chills by integrating individual song preferences and neural activity related to music reward processing. Twenty-four participants listened to both self-selected and other-selected songs, reporting higher pleasure levels and experiencing more chills in their self-selected songs. We constructed two LASSO regression models to support the C-BMI. Model 1 predicted pleasure based on the acoustic features of the self-selected songs. Model 2 classified the EEG responses when participants listened to self-selected versus other-selected songs. Model 1 was applied to over 7,000 candidate songs, predicting pleasure scores. We used these predicted scores and acoustic similarity to the self-selected songs to rank songs that were likely to induce pleasure. Using this ranking, four tailored playlists were generated. Two playlists were designed to augment pleasure by selecting top-ranked songs, one of which incorporated real-time pleasure estimates from Model 2 to continuously update Model 1 and refine song rankings. Additionally, two playlists aimed to diminish pleasure, with one updated using Model 2. We found that the pleasure-augmenting playlist with EEG-based updates elicited more chills and higher pleasure levels than pleasure-diminishing playlists. Our results indicate that C-BMI using in-ear EEG data can enhance music-induced chills.