Semi-blind independent component analysis of functional MRI elicited by continuous listening to music

This study presents a method to analyze blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) signals associated with listening to continuous music. Semi-blind independent component analysis (ICA) was applied to decompose the fMRI data to source level activation maps and their respective temporal courses. The unmixing matrix in the source separation process of ICA was constrained by a variety of acoustic features derived from the piece of music used as the stimulus in the experiment. This allowed more stable estimation and extraction of more activation maps of interest compared to conventional ICA methods.