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The brain of musicians adapts to different music

28.01.2018

It is known that the brain adapts to what we are constantly, day after day, doing. The most famous example here is London taxi drivers, who have to keep a map of all of London in their minds and who therefore have an enlarged part of the brain that controls spatial navigation.

And if we take, for example, musicians, then their brains must work clearly differently than those of all other people who are not involved in music; after all, in order to perform, let alone compose music, different areas of the brain must communicate with each other in a very special way.

What's more, musicians' brains will work differently depending on the kind of music they're playing. Researchers at the Max Planck Society's Institute for the Brain and Human Consciousness compared the brain activity of jazz pianists and classical classical pianists. Jazz, as you know, is built on improvisation, and the musician must be prepared for constant harmonic deviations, unusual chords, etc. In the academic classics, the performer always plays the same notes, but they can play them in different ways - interpretation is valued here , consisting of sound dynamics, intonations and other things; it all depends on how the pianist, roughly speaking, puts his fingers on the keys.

And in the experiment, two groups of musicians were shown a video with a hand playing a certain sequence of chords. In some cases, unexpected, as if erroneous sounds crept into the chords, which opened the way to improvisation, in other cases nothing unusual appeared in harmony, but instead some oddities were in the fingering (i.e., in the order of arrangement and alternation of fingers). The participants in the experiment had to immediately exactly repeat the movements on their piano keyboard (it did not make any sounds, so as not to interfere with observing the work of the brain).

During the game, the musicians, whatever they play, one way or another plan their own movements. And if suddenly plans have to be changed unexpectedly, this can be seen in the brain rhythms on the electroencephalogram. An article in NeuroImage says that jazz pianists, when they had to suddenly repeat an unusual chord, replanned movements a little earlier, and they made fewer mistakes, repeating strange harmonies after the hand. In other words, their brains were constantly ready for improvisation. On the other hand, when it was necessary to play with an unusual fingering, then the brains of the performers of the academic repertoire used to be rebuilt - that is, their brains were by default ready to play the same chords, but in a different way.

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