Commentary: SWS Brain-Wave Music May Improve the Quality of Sleep: An EEG Study

Deep learning Binary/Multi classification for music's brainwave entrainment beats

The last two decades have seen the emergence of a brand-new kind of music known as digital brain stimulant, also known as instrumental music or music without lyrics, which mostly comprises entrainment beats. While listening to it has the same ability to affect the brain as taking medication, it also has the risk of having a negative impact or encouraging unwanted behavior. This sparked the interest of a large number of studies in the psychological and physiological effects of music's brainwave entrainment beats on listeners. These studies started to categorize and examine how musical beats affected brainwave entrainment by looking at electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. Although this categorization represents a step forward for the early research efforts, it is constrained by the difficulty of having each musical track and conducting EEG tests on humans exposed to distortion due to noise in order to determine its influence. The work proposed in this article continues to explore this topic but in a novel, simple, accurate, and reliable categorization procedure based on the music signal elements themselves rather than dependent on EEG. VGGish and YAMNET based transfer deep learning models, are tuned to handle a straightforward, accurate real-time detector for the existence of the music beats inside music files with accuracy of 98.5 and 98.4, respectively. Despite the fact that they yield results that are equivalent, the YAMNET model is more suited for use with mobile devices due to its low power consumption and low latency. The article also proposes modified version of VGGish and YAMNET binary classifying models called BW-VGGish and BW-YAMNET respectively. The modification was to turn the binary classification into multi-classification. These multi-classifiers handle the classification of the influence of music beats (five different brain waves) on human brainwave entrainment with average accuracy of 94.5% and 94.5%, respectively. Since there was a lack of datasets addressing this kind of music, two datasets, the Brainwave Entrainment Beats (BWEB) dataset and the Brainwave Music Manipulation (BWMM) dataset, were generated for classification training and testing. The re-testing on a sample of music files that have their impact on brain waves (with their EEG) in an earlier study is done to strengthen the validity of the proposed work and to overcome the potential limitation of utilizing a music dataset that is not proved with its EEG. The success of the suggested models was demonstrated.

Sleep Quality and Electroencephalogram Delta Power

Delta activity on electroencephalogram (EEG) is considered a biomarker of homeostatic sleep drive. Delta power is often associated with sleep duration and intensity. Here, we reviewed the literature to explore how sleep quality was influenced by changes in delta power. However, we found that both the decrease and increase in delta power could indicate a higher sleep quality due to the various factors below. First, the differences in changes in delta power in patients whose sleep quality is lower than that of the healthy controls may be related to the different diseases they suffered from. We found that the patients mainly suffered from borderline personality disorder, and Rett syndrome may have a higher delta power than healthy individuals. Meanwhile, patients who are affected by Asperger syndrome, respiratory failure, chronic fatigue, and post-traumatic stress disorder have lower delta power. Second, if the insomnia patients received the therapy, the difference may be caused by the treatment method. Cognitive or music therapy shows that a better therapeutic effect is associated with decreased delta power, whereas in drug treatment, there is an opposite change in delta power. Last, for healthy people, the difference in delta change may be related to sleep stages. The higher sleep quality is associated with increased delta power during the NREM period, whereas a deceased delta change accompanies higher sleep quality during the REM period. Our work summarizes the effect of changes in delta power on sleep quality and may positively impact the monitoring and intervention of sleep quality.

Updated Review of the Acoustic Modulation of Sleep: Current Perspectives and Emerging Concepts

With growing interest in the use of acoustic stimuli in sleep research and acoustic interventions used therapeutically for sleep enhancement, there is a need for an overview of the current lines of research. This paper summarizes the various ways to use acoustic input before sleep or stimulation during sleep. It thereby focuses on the respective methodological requirements, advantages, disadvantages, potentials and difficulties of acoustic sleep modulation. It highlights differences in subjective and objective outcome measures, immediate and whole night effects and short versus long term effects. This recognizes the fact that not all outcome parameters are relevant in every research field. The same applies to conclusions drawn from other outcome dimensions, consideration of mediating factors, levels of stimulation processing and the impact of inter-individual differences. In addition to the deliberate influences of acoustic input on sleep, one paragraph describes adverse environmental acoustic influences. Finally, the possibilities for clinical and basic research-related applications are discussed, and emerging opportunities are presented. This overview is not a systematic review but aims to present the current perspective and hence summarizes the most up-to-date research results and reviews. This is the first review providing a summary of the broad spectrum of possibilities to acoustically influence sleep.