Coordination and Consonance Between Interacting, Improvising Musicians.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Setzler M
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8412203 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:The historically developed practice of learning to play a music instrument from notes instead of by imitation or improvisation makes it possible to contrast two types of skilled musicians characterized not only by dissimilar performance practices, but also disparate methods of audiomotor learning. In a recent fMRI study comparing these two groups of musicians while they either imagined playing along with a recording or covertly assessed the quality of the performance, we observed activation of a right-hemisphere network of posterior superior parietal and dorsal premotor cortices in improvising musicians, indicating more efficient audiomotor transformation. In the present study, we investigated the detailed performance characteristics underlying the ability of both groups of musicians to replicate music on the basis of aural perception alone. Twenty-two classically-trained improvising and score-dependent musicians listened to short, unfamiliar two-part excerpts presented with headphones. They played along or replicated the excerpts by ear on a digital piano, either with or without aural feedback. In addition, they were asked to harmonize or transpose some of the excerpts either to a different key or to the relative minor. MIDI recordings of their performances were compared with recordings of the aural model. Concordance was expressed in an audiomotor alignment score computed with the help of music information retrieval algorithms. Significantly higher alignment scores were found when contrasting groups, voices, and tasks. The present study demonstrates the superior ability of improvising musicians to replicate both the pitch and rhythm of aurally perceived music at the keyboard, not only in the original key, but also in other tonalities. Taken together with the enhanced activation of the right dorsal frontoparietal network found in our previous fMRI study, these results underscore the conclusion that the practice of improvising music can be associated with enhanced audiomotor transformation in response to aurally perceived music.
| S-EPMC5105996 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Interhemispheric inhibition (IHI) is essential for dexterous motor control. Small previous studies have shown differences in IHI in musicians compared to non-musicians, but it is not clear whether these differences are robustly linked to musical performance. In the largest study to date, we examined IHI and comprehensive measures of dexterous bimanual performance in 72 individuals (36 musicians and 36 non-musicians). Dexterous bimanual performance was quantified by speed, accuracy, and evenness derived from a series of hand tasks. As expected, musicians significantly outperformed non-musicians. Surprisingly, these performance differences could not be simply explained by IHI, as IHI did not significantly differ between musicians and non-musicians. However, canonical correlation analysis revealed a significant relationship between combinations of IHI and performance variables in the musician group. Specifically, we identified that IHI may contribute to the maintenance of evenness regardless of speed, a feature of musical performance that may be driven by practice with a metronome. Therefore, while IHI changes by themselves may not be sufficient to explain superior hand dexterity exhibited by musicians, IHI may be a potential neural correlate for specific features of musical performance.
| S-EPMC6689014 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BACKGROUND:Exercise training is beneficial in health and disease. Part of the training effect materialises in the brainstem due to the exercise-associated somatosensory nerve traffic. Because active music making also involves somatosensory nerve traffic, we hypothesised that this will have training effects resembling those of physical exercise. METHODS:We compared two groups of healthy, young subjects between 18 and 30 years: 25 music students (13/12 male/female, group M) and 28 controls (12/16 male/female, group C), peers, who were non-musicians. Measurement sessions to determine resting heart rate, resting blood pressure and baroreflex sensitivity (BRS) were held during morning hours. RESULTS:Groups M and C did not differ significantly in age (21.4?±?3.0 vs 21.2?±?3.1 years), height (1.79?±?0.11 vs 1.77?±?0.10 m), weight (68.0?±?9.1 vs 66.8?±?10.4 kg), body mass index (21.2?±?2.5 vs 21.3?±?2.4 kg?m(-2)) and physical exercise volume (39.3?±?38.8 vs 36.6?±?23.6 metabolic equivalent hours/week). Group M practised music daily for 1.8?±?0.7 h. In group M heart rate (65.1?±?10.6 vs 68.8?±?8.3 beats/min, trend P =0.08), systolic blood pressure (114.2?±?8.7 vs 120.3?±?10.0 mmHg, P?=?0.01), diastolic blood pressure (65.0?±?6.1 vs 71.0?±?6.2 mmHg, P?<?0.01) and mean blood pressure (83.7?±?6.4 vs 89.4?±?7.1, P?<?0.01) were lower than in group C. BRS in groups M and C was 12.9?±?6.7 and 11.3?±?5.8 ms/mmHg, respectively (P?=?0.17). CONCLUSIONS:The results of our study suggest that active music making has training effects resembling those of physical exercise training. Our study opens a new perspective, in which active music making, additionally to being an artistic activity, renders concrete health benefits for the musician.
| S-EPMC3673600 | biostudies-other
Project description:Humans perceive musical sound as a complex phenomenon, which is known to induce an emotional response. The cues used to perceive emotion in music have not been unequivocally elucidated. Here, we sought to identify the attributes of sound that confer an emotion to music and determine if professional musicians have different musical emotion perception than non-musicians. The objective was to determine which sound cues are used to resolve emotional signals. Happy or sad classical music excerpts modified in fine structure or envelope conveying different degrees of emotional certainty were presented. Certainty was determined by identification of the emotional characteristic presented during a forced-choice discrimination task. Participants were categorized as good or poor performers (n = 32, age 21.16 ± 2.59 SD) and in a separate group as musicians in the first or last year of music education at a conservatory (n = 32, age 21.97 ± 2.42). We found that temporal fine structure information is essential for correct emotional identification. Non-musicians used less fine structure information to discriminate emotion in music compared with musicians. The present psychophysical experiments revealed what cues are used to resolve emotional signals and how they differ between non-musicians and musically educated individuals.
| S-EPMC6759500 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Some combinations of musical notes are consonant (pleasant), whereas others are dissonant (unpleasant), a distinction central to music. Explanations of consonance in terms of acoustics, auditory neuroscience, and enculturation have been debated for centuries. We utilized individual differences to distinguish the candidate theories. We measured preferences for musical chords as well as nonmusical sounds that isolated particular acoustic factors--specifically, the beating and the harmonic relationships between frequency components, two factors that have long been thought to potentially underlie consonance. Listeners preferred stimuli without beats and with harmonic spectra, but across more than 250 subjects, only the preference for harmonic spectra was consistently correlated with preferences for consonant over dissonant chords. Harmonicity preferences were also correlated with the number of years subjects had spent playing a musical instrument, suggesting that exposure to music amplifies preferences for harmonic frequencies because of their musical importance. Harmonic spectra are prominent features of natural sounds, and our results indicate that they also underlie the perception of consonance.
| S-EPMC2885564 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The ability to remember tempo (the perceived frequency of musical pulse) without external references may be defined, by analogy with the notion of absolute pitch, as absolute tempo (AT). Anecdotal reports and sparse empirical evidence suggest that at least some individuals possess AT. However, to our knowledge, no systematic assessments of AT have been performed using laboratory tasks comparable to those assessing absolute pitch. In the present study, we operationalize AT as the ability to identify and reproduce tempo in the absence of rhythmic or melodic frames of reference and assess these abilities in musically trained and untrained participants. We asked 15 musicians and 15 non-musicians to listen to a seven-step `tempo scale' of metronome beats, each associated to a numerical label, and then to perform two memory tasks. In the first task, participants heard one of the tempi and attempted to report the correct label (identification task), in the second, they saw one label and attempted to tap the correct tempo (production task). A musical and visual excerpt was presented between successive trials as a distractor to prevent participants from using previous tempi as anchors. Thus, participants needed to encode tempo information with the corresponding label, store the information, and recall it to give the response. We found that more than half were able to perform above chance in at least one of the tasks, and that musical training differentiated between participants in identification, but not in production. These results suggest that AT is relatively wide-spread, relatively independent of musical training in tempo production, but further refined by training in tempo identification. We propose that at least in production, the underlying motor representations are related to tactus, a basic internal rhythmic period that may provide a body-based reference for encoding tempo.
| S-EPMC5070877 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Individuals display considerable rate differences in the spontaneous production of rhythmic behaviors (such as speech, gait, dance). Temporal precision in rhythmic behavior tends to be highest at individuals' spontaneous production rates; musically trained partners with similar spontaneous rates show increased synchrony in joint tasks, consistent with predictions based on intrinsic frequencies of coupled oscillators. We address whether partner-specific influences of intrinsic frequencies are evidenced in musically trained and untrained individuals who tapped a familiar melody at a spontaneous (uncued) rate individually. Each individual then synchronized with a partner from the same musicianship group at an initially cued rate that matched the partners' spontaneous rates. Musically trained partners showed greater synchrony in joint tapping than musically untrained partners. Asynchrony increased in both groups as the partners' difference in individual spontaneous rates increased, with greater impact for musically untrained pairs. Recurrence quantification analysis confirmed that musically untrained individuals demonstrated greater determinism (less flexibility) in their tapping than musically trained individuals. Furthermore, individuals with greater determinism in solo performances demonstrated reduced synchrony in joint performances. These findings suggest that musicians' increased temporal flexibility is associated with decreased endogenous constraints on production rate and greater interpersonal synchrony in musical tasks.
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Project description:We measured turn-taking in terms of hand and head movements and asked if the global rhythm of the participants' body activity relates to word learning. Six dyads composed of parents and toddlers (M = 18 months) interacted in a tabletop task wearing motion-tracking sensors on their hands and head. Parents were instructed to teach the labels of 10 novel objects and the child was later tested on a name-comprehension task. Using dynamic time warping, we compared the motion data of all body-part pairs, within and between partners. For every dyad, we also computed an overall measure of the quality of the interaction, that takes into consideration the state of interaction when the parent uttered an object label and the overall smoothness of the turn-taking. The overall interaction quality measure was correlated with the total number of words learned.In particular, head movements were inversely related to other partner's hand movements, and the degree of bodily coupling of parent and toddler predicted the words that children learned during the interaction. The implications of joint body dynamics to understanding joint coordination of activity in a social interaction, its scaffolding effect on the child's learning and its use in the development of artificial systems are discussed.
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Project description:In audiovisual music perception, visual information from a musical instrument being played is available prior to the onset of the corresponding musical sound and consequently allows a perceiver to form a prediction about the upcoming audio music. This prediction in audiovisual music perception, compared to auditory music perception, leads to lower N1 and P2 amplitudes and latencies. Although previous research suggests that audiovisual experience, such as previous musical experience may enhance this prediction, a remaining question is to what extent musical experience modifies N1 and P2 amplitudes and latencies. Furthermore, corresponding event-related phase modulations quantified as inter-trial phase coherence (ITPC) have not previously been reported for audiovisual music perception. In the current study, audio video recordings of a keyboard key being played were presented to musicians and non-musicians in audio only (AO), video only (VO), and audiovisual (AV) conditions. With predictive movements from playing the keyboard isolated from AV music perception (AV-VO), the current findings demonstrated that, compared to the AO condition, both groups had a similar decrease in N1 amplitude and latency, and P2 amplitude, along with correspondingly lower ITPC values in the delta, theta, and alpha frequency bands. However, while musicians showed lower ITPC values in the beta-band in AV-VO compared to the AO, non-musicians did not show this pattern. Findings indicate that AV perception may be broadly correlated with auditory perception, and differences between musicians and non-musicians further indicate musical experience to be a specific factor influencing AV perception. Predicting an upcoming sound in AV music perception may involve visual predictory processes, as well as beta-band oscillations, which may be influenced by years of musical training. This study highlights possible interconnectivity in AV perception as well as potential modulation with experience.
| S-EPMC7273518 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Music can be thought of as a dynamic path over time. In most cases, the rhythmic structure of this path, such as specific sequences of strong and weak beats or recurring patterns, allows us to predict what and particularly when sounds are going to happen. Without this ability we would not be able to entrain body movements to music, like we do when we dance. By combining EEG and behavioral measures, the current study provides evidence illustrating the importance of ongoing neural oscillations at beat-related frequencies-i.e., neural entrainment-for tracking and predicting musical rhythms. Participants (13 musicians and 13 non-musicians) listened to drum rhythms that switched from a quadruple rhythm to a 3-over-4 polyrhythm. After a silent period of ~2-3 s, participants had to decide whether a target stimulus was presented on time with the triple beat of the polyrhythm, too early, or too late. Results showed that neural oscillations reflected the rhythmic structure of both the simple quadruple rhythm and the more complex polyrhythm with no differences between musicians and non-musicians. During silent periods, the observation of time-frequency plots and more commonly used frequency spectra analyses suggest that beat-related neural oscillations were more pronounced in musicians compared to non-musicians. Neural oscillations during silent periods are not driven by an external input and therefore are thought to reflect top-down controlled endogenous neural entrainment. The functional relevance of endogenous neural entrainment was demonstrated by a positive correlation between the amplitude of task-relevant neural oscillations during silent periods and the number of correctly identified target stimuli. In sum, our findings add to the evidence supporting the neural resonance theory of pulse and meter. Furthermore, they indicate that beat-related top-down controlled neural oscillations can exist without external stimulation and suggest that those endogenous oscillations are strengthened by musical expertise. Finally, this study shows that the analysis of neural oscillations can be a useful tool to assess how we perceive and process complex auditory stimuli such as polyrhythms.
| S-EPMC5388767 | biostudies-literature