Recent brain imaging studies of professional musicians have demonstrated that silent tapping of musical phrases can stimulate auditory areas of the cortex and hearing music can stimulate areas of the motor cortex. Moreover, according to anecdotal evidence, hearing music can cause pianists to move their fingers involuntarily.
To find out how fast links between these two brain areas could be formed Marc Bangert and Eckart Altenmller, from the Institute of Music Physiology and Musicians' Medicine in Hanover, examined the effects on the brain of taking up a musical instrument from scratch. Their results showed that patterns of brain activity when listening to music or silently tapping a keyboard could be altered after just 20 minutes of piano practice. These changes were enhanced after five weeks of training.
Two groups of beginner pianists undertook ten 20-minute training sessions over the course of five weeks. In these sessions they learned to play back musical phrases they heard on a digital piano. No visual or verbal cues like tone names or score notation, or even their own hands visible on the piano keys, were allowed during training. This policy ensured that the training exercise involved only auditory and motor skills.
The two groups differed slightly in their training regime. The first group (the 'map' group) used digital pianos where the five neighbouring keys had appropriate notes assigned to them. The second group (the 'no-map' group) used pianos where the assignment of notes to the five keys was 'shuffled' after each training trial. The researchers explain: "The 'no-map' group was not given any ch
'"/>
Contact: Gemma Bradley
press@biomedcentral.com
44-207-323-0323
BioMed Central
14-Oct-2003