Development and Interrelation of Pain, Depression, and Anxiety in Music Students: Does Successful Treatment of Pain Have an Impact on Mental Health?

Objective: Musculoskeletal pain is a common problem among professional musicians as well as music students. Studies have emphasized the effectiveness of music-specific physiotherapy for affected musicians. This study was designed to evaluate if physiotherapy treatment of pain-affected music students had an impact on pain perception as well as psychological well-being.

Modulation of Motor Vigor by Expectation of Reward Probability Trial-by-Trial Is Preserved in Healthy Ageing and Parkinson's Disease Patients.

Motor improvements, such as faster movement times or increased velocity, have been associated with reward magnitude in deterministic contexts. Yet whether individual inferences on reward probability influence motor vigor dynamically remains undetermined. We investigated how dynamically inferring volatile action-reward contingencies modulated motor performance trial-by-trial.

Improved Speech in Noise Perception in the Elderly After 6 Months of Musical Instruction.

Understanding speech in background noise poses a challenge in daily communication, which is a particular problem among the elderly. Although musical expertise has often been suggested to be a contributor to speech intelligibility, the associations are mostly correlative. In the present multisite study conducted in Germany and Switzerland, 156 healthy, normal-hearing elderly were randomly assigned to either piano playing or music listening/musical culture groups.

Elevated Forearm Coactivation Levels and Higher Temporal Variability in String Players with Musicians' Dystonia During Demanding Playing Conditions.

Aims: There is a lack of an objective measurement tool for evaluating the quality of bowing performance in string players. The present study aimed to assess kinematic features of bow strokes performed by violinists and violists affected by bow arm dystonia, compared to healthy controls.

Methods: Seven musicians with musician's dystonia and 20 healthy controls participated in the study.

Musical Sonification of Arm Movements in Stroke Rehabilitation Yields Limited Benefits.

Neurologic music therapy in rehabilitation of stroke patients has been shown to be a promising supplement to the often strenuous conventional rehabilitation strategies. The aim of this study was threefold: (i) replicate results from a previous study with a sample from one clinic (henceforth called Site 1; = 12) using an already established recording system, and (ii) conceptually replicate previous findings with a less costly hand-tracking system in Site 2 ( = 30), and (iii) compare both sub-studies' outcomes to estimate the efficiency of neurologic music therapy. Stroke patients in both sites were randomly assigned to treatment or control groups and received daily training of guided sequential upper limb movements additional to their standard stroke rehabilitation protocol.

Pathophysiology of writer's cramp: an exploratory study on task-specificity and non-motor symptoms using an extended fine-motor testing battery.

Background: Writer's cramp (WC) is a task-specific focal dystonia which manifests itself as abnormal postures interfering with motor performance. As the spread of motor symptoms remains controversial and non-motor symptoms are widely discussed, in this exploratory study, we explore the pathophysiology of WC, focusing on task-specificity and the psychological profiles of WC patients.

Methods: In 14 right-handed WC patients and matched controls, we assessed motor control by applying motor performance tests (Vienna Test Series), as well as using writing analysis and grip-force measurements.

Sonification of Arm Movements in Stroke Rehabilitation - A Novel Approach in Neurologic Music Therapy.

Gross motor impairments are common after stroke, but efficient and motivating therapies for these impairments are scarce. We present an innovative musical sonification therapy, especially designed to retrain patients' gross motor functions. Sonification should motivate patients and provide additional sensory input informing about relative limb position.

Moving with music for stroke rehabilitation: a sonification feasibility study.

Gross-motor impairments are common after stroke, but efficacious and motivating therapies for these impairments are scarce. We present a novel musical sonification therapy especially designed to retrain gross-motor functions. Four stroke patients were included in a clinical pre-post feasibility study and were trained with our sonification training.

Musician's dystonia is highly task specific: no strong evidence for everyday fine motor deficits in patients.

Objectives: 1) To examine the fine motor skills used everyday by patients suffering from musician's dystonia (MD) in the upper limb in order to verify whether MD is task-specific; and 2) to compare the affected and non-affected hands of MD musicians vs healthy musicians in performance of these tasks in order to clarify whether dystonic symptoms can be found in the non-affected side of MD patients.

Background: MD is typically considered to be focal and task specific, but patients often report impairment in everyday life activities. Furthermore, in the course of MD, about 15% of patients complain of dystonic symptoms in other parts of the body.

Sonification as a possible stroke rehabilitation strategy.

Despite cerebral stroke being one of the main causes of acquired impairments of motor skills worldwide, well-established therapies to improve motor functions are sparse. Recently, attempts have been made to improve gross motor rehabilitation by mapping patient movements to sound, termed sonification. Sonification provides additional sensory input, supplementing impaired proprioception.

Sensory trick phenomenon improves motor control in pianists with dystonia: prognostic value of glove-effect.

Musician's dystonia (MD) is a task-specific movement disorder that causes loss of voluntary motor control while playing the instrument. A subgroup of patients displays the so-called sensory trick: alteration of somatosensory input, e.g.

Altered sensory feedbacks in pianist's dystonia: the altered auditory feedback paradigm and the glove effect.

Background: This study investigates the effect of altered auditory feedback (AAF) in musician's dystonia (MD) and discusses whether AAF can be considered as a sensory trick in MD. Furthermore, the effect of AAF is compared with altered tactile feedback, which can serve as a sensory trick in several other forms of focal dystonia.

Methods: The method is based on scale analysis (Jabusch et al.

Defective inhibition and inter-regional phase synchronization in pianists with musician's dystonia: an EEG study.

Recent neurophysiological studies have associated focal-task specific dystonia (FTSD) with impaired inhibitory function. However, it remains unknown whether FTSD also affects the inhibition (INH) of long-term overlearned motor programs. Consequently, we investigated in a Go/NoGo paradigm the neural correlates associated with the activation (ACT) and inhibition of long-term overlearned motor memory traces in pianists with musician's dystonia (MD), a form of FTSD, during a relevant motor task under constraint timing conditions with multichannel EEG.

Brain processing of meter and rhythm in music. Electrophysiological evidence of a common network.

To determine cortical structures involved in "global" meter and "local" rhythm processing, slow brain potentials (DC potentials) were recorded from the scalp of 18 musically trained subjects while listening to pairs of monophonic sequences with both metric structure and rhythmic variations. The second sequence could be either identical to or different from the first one. Differences were either of a metric or a rhythmic nature.