Musicians exchange non-verbal cues as messages when they play together. This is particularly true in music with a sketchy outline. Jazz musicians receive and interpret the cues when performance parts from a regular pattern of rhythm, suggesting that they enjoy a highly developed sensitivity to subtle deviations of rhythm. We demonstrate that pre-attentive brain responses recorded with magnetoen...

Musculoskeletal symptoms, especially in the upper body, are frequent among professional symphony orchestra musicians. Physical exercise may relieve pain but might also interfere with playing performance. OBJECTIVE To evaluate the feasibility and effect of "specific strength training" (SST) versus "general fitness training" (GFT). METHODS A feasibility study using randomized controlled metho...

At the level of the auditory cortex, musicians discriminate pitch changes more accurately than nonmusicians. However, it is not agreed upon how sound familiarity and musical expertise interact in the formation of pitch-change discrimination skills, that is, whether musicians possess musical pitch discrimination abilities that are generally more accurate than in nonmusicians or, alternatively, w...

This paper describes three simple virtual musical instruments that use physical models to map between live sound and computer generated audio and video. The intention is that this approach will provide musicians with an intuitively understandable environment that facilitates musical expression and exploration. Musicians live sound exerts ‘forces’ on simple mass-spring physical models which move...

Music in dreams is rarely reported in scientific literature, while the presence of musical themes in dreams of famous musicians is anecdotally reported. We did a systematic investigation to evaluate whether the occurrence of musical dreams could be related to musical competence and practice, and to explore specific features of dreamt pieces. Thirty-five professional musicians and thirty non-mus...

Several reports have indicated a higher incidence of absolute pitch in blind than in sighted musicians. Employing a pitch memory task, we examined whether a blind absolute pitch musician would rely on different neural correlates than a group of sighted absolute pitch musicians. The blind musician showed significantly more activation of bihemispheric visual association areas, lingual gyrus, pari...

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...