 Making a Mental Note
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Oct. 16, 2003 — It may take years to excel at the piano but the vital mental "map" you create to make sense of what you hear when your fingers hit a key, forms almost as soon as you start to train, a new study suggests.
The brains of novice players start making those maps within just 20 minutes of having their first piano lesson, said Marc Bangert and Eckart Altenmüller of the Institute of Music Physiology and Musicians' Medicine in Hanover, Germany, in a report Wednesday in the journal BMC Neuroscience.
The study probed how a player's brain processes and coordinates input from two very different sources — sound and movement: "The mastering of a musical instrument requires some of the most sophisticated skills, including fast auditory as well as motor processing," the researchers said.
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In professional musicians at least, recent brain imaging studies have shown that the different ways they respond to sound and finger movements seem paradoxical: when they hear a sound it activates areas of the brain that process movement, but when they silently tap out musical phrases it evokes brain activity in areas involved in hearing.
"Professional musicians often report that pure listening to a well-trained piece of music can involuntarily trigger the respective finger movements," the report noted.
One study took brain scans of eight violinists with German orchestras and compared them with eight amateurs as they silently tapped out the first 16 bars of Mozart's violin concerto in G major: the expert performers had significant activity in the sound-processing regions of their brains, but the amateurs had none.
But it was not known until now whether these links between hearing and movement require many years of practice to develop or can be learned quickly. So Bangert and Altenmüller monitored how the brains of novice musicians responded during 10 sessions of 20-minute training over five weeks, learning the piano from scratch.
The subjects heard musical phrases and used a digital piano to learn to play them back. To make sure that only responses to hearing and movement were being recorded, the subjects were given no visual or verbal cues, such as tone names or musical score notation. They were not even allowed to see their own hands on the piano keys during training.
A further twist was introduced into the study as well. The subjects were split into two groups, known as the "map" and "no-map" groups, and given slightly different training regimes.
The "map" group used pianos where five neighboring keys had appropriate notes assigned to them. The "no-map" group used pianos where the assignment of notes to the five keys was randomly shuffled after each training trial.
"The 'no-map' group was not given any chance to figure out any coupling between fingers and notes, except the temporal coincidence of keystroke and sound," the report said. "In other words, these subjects were not given any opportunity to establish an internal 'map' between motor events and auditory pitch targets."
All subjects showed clear signs of relevant changes in brain activity after just one session, but after five sessions the activity patterns of the two groups differed significantly. The motor areas relating to the hands of those in the "map" group were activated when they were listening to music, whereas those of the subjects in the "no-map" group were not.
Another part of the brain — the anterior region of the right hemisphere — was also found to be more active in the "map" group. The researchers suggest that this region could be where the mental "map" representing the link between a note and a piano key is established.
Earlier research has suggested that the right anterior region is involved in the perception of melodic and harmonic pitch sequences: "Interestingly, the respective area in the left hemisphere is where you would find Broca's area, where much of our speech processing happens," Bangert said.
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