Little is known about the underlying neurobiology of rhythm and beat perception, despite its universal cultural importance. Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to study rhythm perception in musicians and nonmusicians. Three conditions varied in the degree to which external reinforcement versus internal generation of the beat was required. The "volume" condition strongly externall...

In general, people who perform repetitive motions are often vulnerable to repetitive strain injuries. Because musicians must execute the same motion over and over again while practicing and performing their music, they are an example of a group that often develops these repetitive strain injuries. More specifically, musicians are known for developing neuropathies in their upper limbs, with carp...

For years, people have appealed to engineering as the dominant metaphor for how software testing should be done. Yet there are many other metaphors that could provide value to learning about patterns and principles in software testing. As professional testers and non-professional musicians, we observe that music affords such a metaphor. What are the parallels between music and testing—especiall...

In this paper, we describe the composition of a piece for choir and Integral Music Controller. We focus more on the aesthetic, conceptual, and practical aspects of the interface and less on the technological details. We especially stress the influence that the designed interface poses on the compositional process and how we approach the expressive organisation of musical materials during the co...

BACKGROUND Formal musical training is known to have positive effects on attentional and executive functioning, processing speed, and working memory. Consequently, one may expect to find differences in the dynamics of temporal attention between musicians and non-musicians. Here we address the question whether that is indeed the case, and whether any beneficial effects of musical training on temp...

Past research has shown that musical training induces changes in the processing of supra-segmental aspects of speech, such as pitch and prosody. The aim of the present study was to determine whether musical expertise also leads to an altered neurophysiological processing of sub-segmental information available in the speech signal, in particular the voice-onset-time. Using high-density EEG-recor...