musicians

INTRODUCTION: Task specific dystonia is a movement disorder only affecting a highly practiced skill and is found in a broad set of expert movements including in sports. Despite affecting many sports, there is no comprehensive review of treatment options, which is in contrast to better studied forms of task specific dystonia in musicians and writers. For this reason, studies involving an intervention to treat task specific dystonia in sports were systematically reviewed, with special attention for the quality of outcome measures...

Metacognition is essential in the musical learning process as it involves understanding the purpose of each task, its planning, execution and evaluation. Considering the relevance of metacognitive processes, our objective in this study was to investigate how expert and beginner musicians manifest and verbalize their metacognitive processes in the context of preparing repertoire for a performance. The method used was a multi-case study carried out in two different contexts: with the five members of a brass quintet made up of professional musicians and with three beginner university violin students...

Music is a ubiquitous form of entertainment, engaging millions and providing emotional release for both musicians and listeners. Songs referencing suicide - a generally taboo subject - are common in U.S. culture, appearing in every genre of music from country to hip hop, punk rock to blues. Suicide songs prompt concern among the lay public (e.g., lawmakers, parents) and also researchers, whose work has documented statistically significant relationships between musical preference and suicidality. Still, suicide songs could also carry positive effects for listeners through behavioral modeling by illustrating alternatives to suicide...

Mental training has been used successfully by professional musicians and athletes, yet rarely applied in pedagogical processes. As research in neuroscience can now explain how it connects to the processes of learning, its application and adaptation in pedagogy can now be explored. The aim of this mixed methods study was to investigate concepts of repetition and practice with mental training, and discuss adaptations for young violinists, to include attention, awareness, and creative musicality. Three exercises were developed with nine students (average age 8)...

PURPOSE: The SOUND method offers an innovative blended intervention based on music circle-activities and cognitive stimulation approaches which was co-designed by musicians, health professionals, older people with dementia, family caregivers and researchers, for its application in dementia settings. The purpose of the paper is to describe the detailed procedure of the quasi-experimental pilot study. METHOD: The experimental phase of SOUND uses a mixed-method design encompassing qualitative and quantitative observations, cognitive testing, self-report and interviewer-assisted questionnaires to investigate the effectiveness of the intervention for 45 people with dementia and 45 professionals (15 in every study country: Italy, Portugal, Romania)...

In this theoretical review, we examine how the roles of music in mate choice and social bonding are expressed in romantic relationships. Darwin's Descent of Man originally proposed the idea that musicality might have evolved as a sexually selected trait. This proposition, coupled with the portrayal of popular musicians as sex symbols and the prevalence of love-themed lyrics in music, suggests a possible link between music and attraction. However, recent scientific exploration of the evolutionary functions of music has predominantly focused on theories of social bonding and group signaling, with limited research addressing the sexual selection hypothesis...

OBJECTIVE: The study aimed to translate, culturally adapt, and test the psychometric properties of the Musculoskeletal Pain Intensity and Interference Questionnaire for Musicians (MPIIQM) in an Italian population of professional and amateur musicians. METHODS: The translation and cultural adaptation process followed international guidelines, while the reliability and validity of the questionnaire were assessed against the COSMIN checklist. The internal consistency was calculated using Cronbach's alpha (a) coefficient...

This study adopts a cross-linguistic perspective and investigates how musical expertise affects the perception of duration and pitch in language. Native speakers of Chinese (N = 44) and Estonian (N = 46), each group subdivided into musicians and non-musicians, participated in a mismatch negativity (MMN) experiment where they passively listened to both Chinese and Estonian stimuli, followed by a behavioral experiment where they attentively discriminated the stimuli in the non-native language (i...

Music is powerful in conveying emotions and triggering affective brain mechanisms. Affective brain responses in previous studies were however rather inconsistent, potentially because of the non-adaptive nature of recorded music used so far. Live music instead can be dynamic and adaptive and is often modulated in response to audience feedback to maximize emotional responses in listeners. Here, we introduce a setup for studying emotional responses to live music in a closed-loop neurofeedback setup. This setup linked live performances by musicians to neural processing in listeners, with listeners' amygdala activity was displayed to musicians in real time...

Learning to play the piano is a unique complex task, integrating multiple sensory modalities and higher order cognitive functions. Longitudinal neuroimaging studies on adult novice musicians show training-related functional changes in music perception tasks. The reorganization of brain activity while actually playing an instrument was studied only on a very short time frame of a single fMRI session, and longer interventions have not yet been performed. Thus, our aim was to investigate the dynamic complexity of functional brain reorganization while playing the piano within the first half year of musical training...

Explored through EEG/MEG, auditory stimuli function as a suitable research probe to reveal various neural activities, including event-related potentials, brain oscillations and functional connectivity. Accumulating evidence in this field stems from studies investigating neuroplasticity induced by long-term auditory training, specifically cross-sectional studies comparing musicians and non-musicians as well as longitudinal studies with musicians. In contrast, studies that address the neural effects of short-term interventions whose duration lasts from minutes to hours are only beginning to be featured...

Using a creative production task, jazz improvisation, we tested alternative hypotheses about the flow experience: (A) that it is a state of domain-specific processing optimized by experience and characterized by minimal interference from task-negative default-mode network (DMN) activity versus (B) that it recruits domain-general task-positive DMN activity supervised by the fronto-parietal control network (FPCN) to support ideation. We recorded jazz guitarists' electroencephalograms (EEGs) while they improvised to provided chord sequences...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Most studies in literature attribute the benefits of musical training on speech in noise (SIN) perception to "experience-based" plasticity, which assists in the activation of speech-processing networks. However, whether musicianship provides an advantage for the listening effort (LE) required to comprehend speech in degraded environments has received less attention. The current study aimed to understand the influence of Indian classical music training on SIN perception and its related LE across percussionists, non-percussionists, and non-musicians...

Playing musical instruments places unusually high demands on specific parts of the human body. Relative to the instruments they play, musicians may experience instrument-related symptoms, as recorded in flute players. The objective was to provide an overview of the study findings addressing medical problems in flautists to better understand their complaints and pave the way for more personalized healthcare. Several electronic databases (PubMed, Embase, Cochrane Library) were systematically searched in July 2022...

Orthopaedic surgery training focuses primarily on the knowledge base and surgical techniques that comprise the fundamental and physical pillars of performance. It also pays much less attention to the mental pillar of performance than does the training of other specialists such as aviators, elite athletes, musicians, and Special Forces operators. However, mental skills optimize the ability to achieve the ideal state during surgery that includes absolute focus with the right amount of confidence and stress. The path to this state begins before surgery with visualization of the surgical steps and potential complications...

INTRODUCTION: MRI-guided focused ultrasound (FUS) is an incisionless thermo-ablative procedure that may be used to treat medication-refractory movement disorders, with a growing number of potential anatomic targets and clinical applications. As of this article's publication, the only US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved uses of FUS for movement disorders are thalamotomy for essential tremor (ET) and tremor-dominant Parkinson's Disease (PD), and pallidotomy for other cardinal symptoms of PD...

Chronic exposure to loud sound leads to noise-induced hearing loss. This is especially common in collegiate-level musicians. Existing methods for estimating exposure typically do not consider genre- or instrument-specific variability in soundscape/spectral characteristics. We measured sound exposure levels (SELs) across instruments, bands, and genres at a university music school. We found (1) considerable variability in SELs across instruments and bands, (2) that Jazz musicians are consistently exposed to the highest sound levels, and (3) that spectral features of music differ between instrument type and genre, and based on room size...

INTRODUCTION: This study aimed to investigate the Self-Regulated Learning behaviors of advanced Brazilian and Portuguese musicians and how these processes vary in terms of gender, nationality, musical instrument, quantity of practice, expertise, and professional experience. METHODS: 300 participants fully completed the 22-item questionnaire "Attitudes in music practice". The sample comprised of 54.3% males, 44.0% females, and 1% non-binary; 0.7% did not respond...

Considerable evidence suggests that musical education induces structural and functional neuroplasticity in the brain. This study aimed to explore the potential impact of such changes on word-reading proficiency. We investigated whether musical training promotes the development of uncharted orthographic regions in the right hemisphere leading to better reading abilities. A total of 60 healthy, right-handed culturally matched professional musicians and controls took part in this research. They were categorised as normo-typical readers based on their reading speed (syl/sec) and subdivided into two groups of relatively good and poor readers...

INTRODUCTION: Playing-related musculoskeletal pain is highly prevalent among classical music students, affecting them physically and psychologically. Unlike athletes or dancers, musicians' pain often goes untreated due to stigma and lack of specialised healthcare. While warm-up exercises are common practice in sports and dance, there is a lack of empirical research regarding physical warm-ups for musicians' pain. This study aimed to investigate the effects of a 2-week daily warm-up exercise intervention on conservatoire students' pain intensity, interference and psychological distress, at day 0 and after 2 weeks...