Music for epilepsy: impact of temporal music structure on intervention outcomes

Previous music interventions for epilepsy have reportedly associated favorable patient outcomes with exposure to Mozart's Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major (K. 448). Other songs have reportedly replicated this phenomenon, raising the possibility that music reportedly associated with favorable outcomes might contain similar properties. This exploratory study investigated this possibility, which could inform a conceptual foundation for prospective works and future hypotheses. Music was assigned to Group A (literature-reported favorable intervention outcomes) or Group B (literature-reported as not favorable intervention outcomes). Both groups had 14 time-varying features describing loudness and frequency extracted. Temporal feature properties were represented by their quasi-periods (time-varying period) and jitter (period deviation). Psychoacoustic features associated with subjective sound perception were extracted from each group to examine descriptive differences between loudness and dissonance-related values. Further analysis of non-intervention works assessed whether patterns were composer-specific or group traits. Significant temporal and psychoacoustic differences were observed. Group A's temporal features had similar quasi-periods with less jitter, whereas Group B's had significantly different quasi-periods with increased jitter. In other words, features of Group A behaved temporally similar with greater stability than Group B. Psychoacoustic estimators indicated that music from Group A exhibited lower loudness and dissonance-related values compared to Group B. Observations from this preliminary study showed contrasting properties between the literature-defined music groups. These observations are not evidence of an association between literature-defined groups and intervention outcomes. However, they could inform future intervention designs following prospective validations in controlled clinical settings.