Identification and Illustration of Means to a Critical Assessment of Music and Health Research Literature.

In 2019, the WHO released a scoping review investigating art therapies in evidence-based healthcare practices to identify and understand the gaps in the literature. However, the studies curated were not evaluated for their quality. To address this limitation, several assessment tools to critically appraise music-based research studies that investigate therapies pertaining to preventative healthcare were investigated.

Coordination of breathing and various movement markers during pianists' performance tasks.

Few investigations have analysed the relations of breathing and pianists' movements. In past studies, however, coordination of breathing with repetitive movements were examined. The current experiment explored the coordinative relations of breathing with three different finger-movement markers (pitch, meter, and thumb passage) during the performance of repetitive exercises at the piano.

Assessment of piano-related injuries using infrared imaging.

Playing the piano is a repetitive task that involves the use of the hands and the arms. Pain related to piano-playing can result in extending the tissues and ligaments of the hands and arms beyond their mechanical tolerance. Infrared imaging records the skin temperature and produces a thermal map of the imaged body part; small variations in the skin temperature could be a sign of inflammation or stress of the tissues.