The authors present the results of 84 musicians with focal task-specific dystonia treated with EMG-guided botulinum toxin injections. Treatment outcome was assessed by subjective estimation of playing before and after treatment and self-rating of treatment response. Fifty-eight (69%) of the musicians experienced improvement from the injections and 30 of 84 musicians (36%) reported long-term ben...

Perceptual and neurophysiological enhancements in linguistic processing in musicians suggest that domain specific experience may enhance neural resources recruited for language specific behaviors. In everyday situations, listeners are faced with extracting speech signals in degraded listening conditions. Here, we examine whether musical training provides resilience to the degradative effects of...

Auditory-sensorimotor coupling is critical for musical performance, during which auditory and somatosensory feedback signals are used to ensure desired outputs. Previous studies reported opercular activation in subjects performing or listening to music. A functional connectivity analysis suggested the parietal operculum (PO) as a connector hub that links auditory, somatosensory, and motor corti...

Objective To test the “27 club” hypothesis that famous musicians are at an increased risk of death at age 27. Design Cohort study using survival analysis with age as a time dependent exposure. Comparison was primarily made within musicians, and secondarily relative to the general UK population. Setting The popular music scene from a UK perspective. Participants Musicians (solo artists and band ...

BACKGROUND Hearing disorders have been associated with occupational exposure to music. Musicians may benefit from non-amplified and low-intensity music, but may also have high risks of music-induced hearing loss. AIMS To compare the incidence of hearing loss (HL) and its subentities in professional musicians with that in the general population. METHODS We performed a historical cohort study...

Even in the quietest of rooms, our senses are perpetually inundated by a barrage of sounds, requiring the auditory system to adapt to a variety of listening conditions in order to extract signals of interest (e.g., one speaker's voice amidst others). Brain networks that promote selective attention are thought to sharpen the neural encoding of a target signal, suppressing competing sounds and en...

Playing-related musculoskeletal disorders (PRMD) and pain are a common phenomenon in professional musicians, with a prevalence of up to 80%. A majority of musicians are not aware that pain influences their performance excellence. Recent research data demonstrate that pain has the impact to change motor control strategies. Musicians with pain experience coordination impairments, muscle inhibitio...

To increase our understanding of auditory neurocognition in musicians, we compared nonmusicians with amateur band musicians in their neural and behavioral sound encoding accuracy. Mismatch negativity and P3a components of the auditory event-related potentials were recorded to changes in basic acoustic features (frequency, duration, location, intensity, gap) and abstract features (melodic contou...

How are body representations updated when we perform joint rhythmic actions, such as when a jazz player synchronizes with other musicians in the ensemble? We investigated this question using a continuous tapping task where musicians and non-musicians were instructed to imitate bimanual hand movements presented in the egocentric and the mirror orientation. The observed movements increased in tem...