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There’s always that one moment in that one song that never fails to give you goosebumps. Whether it comes from the sonic depth charge of an EDM bass drop, the soaring strains of an operatic aria, or the explosive crescendo of a frenetic guitar solo, the feeling is the same. And it’s not just a mere skin tingle; these musical chills represent a bona fide neurological phenomenon, engaging your brain’s reward and pleasure centers.
While these shivers of auditory ecstasy are universal sensations, the subjectivity of musical tastes makes them difficult to reproduce reliably. Although Spotify’s algorithm might seem clairvoyant at times, it can’t actually read your mind. But what if it could?
That’s the question researchers from Keio University in Japan set out to answer in a study recently published in iScience.
To increase the frequency of music chills, the team of neuroscientists built a system they termed the “Chill Brain-Music Interface” (C-BMI). Data from compact in-ear electroencephalography (EEG) sensors monitoring brain activity allowed them to build optimized and personalized playlists.
Read more: “Could AI Help Me Compose a Musical Expression of Love?”
The subjects in the study first listened to songs they selected themselves, then songs selected by others, all while the EEG sensors recorded their brain activity. Using this data, the researchers built two different models for playlist construction: one based on the acoustic elements of the songs (similar to current music streaming recommendation algorithms), and one based on the level of pleasure recorded by the in-ear EEGs. Next, they combined the two models into a closed-loop system that generated playlists aimed at either boosting or decreasing pleasure, with some incorporating the real-time neural data and others not.
The results? The playlists generated by the C-BMI using neural feedback from the EEGs yielded more chills and higher pleasure ratings than the standard “acoustics-only” method.
While creating a more perfect playlist is a noble endeavor on its own, the team thinks this new system could have important mental-health applications. “If this non-invasive system could be integrated with in-ear earphones equipped with EEG sensors and wellness and music-streaming apps, it could offer emotional support during commutes, before sleep, or in daily life,” Sotaro Kondoh, the paper’s first author and a research fellow at Keio University’s Center for Music Science, said in a statement.
As long as you’re ok with your earbuds reading your mind, that is. 
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Lead image: Piscine26 / Shutterstock
