A Review of Real-time Eeg Sonification Research

Over the last few decades there has been steady growth in research that addresses the real-time sonification of electroencephalographic (EEG) data. Diverse application areas include medical data screening, Brain Computer Interfaces (BCI), neurofeedback, affective computing and applications in the arts. The present paper presents an overview and critical review of the principal research to date in EEG data sonification. Firstly, we identify several sub-domains of real-time EEG sonification and discuss their diverse approaches and goals. Secondly, we describe our search and inclusion criteria, and then present a synoptic summary table spanning over fifty different research projects or published research findings. Thirdly, we analyze sonification approaches to the various EEG data dimensions such as time-frequency filtering, signal level, location, before going on to consider higher order EEG features. Finally, we discuss future application domains which may benefit from new capabilities in the real-time sonification of EEG data. We believe that the present critical review may help to reduce research fragmentation and may aid future collaboration in this emerging multidisciplinary area.