Chills as an indicator of individual emotional peaks.

Chills (goose bumps) have been repeatedly associated with positive emotional peaks. Chills seem to be related to distinct musical structures and the reward system in the brain. A new approach that uses chills as indicators of individual emotional peaks is discussed.

Etiology of musician's dystonia: familial or environmental?

Objective: To test the hypothesis that there is familial aggregation of dystonia and other movement disorders in relatives of patients with musician's dystonia (MD) and to identify possible environmental triggers.

Methods: The families of 28 index patients with MD (14 with a reported positive family history of focal task-specific dystonia [FTSD] and 14 with no known family history [FH-]) underwent a standardized telephone screening interview using a modified version of the Beth Israel Dystonia Screen. Videotaped neurologic examinations were performed on all participants who screened positive and consensus diagnoses established.

Detecting wrong notes in advance: neuronal correlates of error monitoring in pianists.

Music performance is an extremely rapid process with low incidence of errors even at the fast rates of production required. This is possible only due to the fast functioning of the self-monitoring system. Surprisingly, no specific data about error monitoring have been published in the music domain.

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.

Neurology of musical performance.

Performing music at a professional level requires the integration of multimodal sensory and motor information and precise monitoring of the performance via auditory feedback. In the context of Western classical music, musicians are forced to reproduce highly controlled movements almost perfectly with a high reliability. These specialised sensorimotor skills are acquired during extensive training periods over many years.

Unforgettable film music: the role of emotion in episodic long-term memory for music.

Background: Specific pieces of music can elicit strong emotions in listeners and, possibly in connection with these emotions, can be remembered even years later. However, episodic memory for emotional music compared with less emotional music has not yet been examined. We investigated whether emotional music is remembered better than less emotional music.

Emotions over time: synchronicity and development of subjective, physiological, and facial affective reactions to music.

Most people are able to identify basic emotions expressed in music and experience affective reactions to music. But does music generally induce emotion? Does it elicit subjective feelings, physiological arousal, and motor reactions reliably in different individuals? In this interdisciplinary study, measurement of skin conductance, facial muscle activity, and self-monitoring were synchronized with musical stimuli. A group of 38 participants listened to classical, rock, and pop music and reported their feelings in a two-dimensional emotion space during listening.

Dominantly transmitted focal dystonia in families of patients with musician's cramp.

Musician's dystonia is generally considered a sporadic disorder. We present three families with the index patient affected by musician's dystonia, but other forms of upper limb focal task-specific dystonia (FTSD), mainly writer's cramp, in seven relatives. Our results suggest a genetic contribution to FTSD with phenotypic variability, including musician's dystonia.

Classical conditioned responses to absent tones.

Background: Recent evidence for a tight coupling of sensorimotor processes in trained musicians led to the question of whether this coupling extends to preattentively mediated reflexes; particularly, whether a classically conditioned response in one of the domains (auditory) is generalized to another (tactile/motor) on the basis of a prior association in a second-order Pavlovian paradigm. An eyeblink conditioning procedure was performed in 17 pianists, serving as a model for overlearned audiomotor integration, and 14 non-musicians.

Results: During the training session, subjects were conditioned to respond to auditory stimuli (piano tones).

Remember Bach: an investigation in episodic memory for music.

Emotional events are remembered better than nonemotional ones, especially after a long period of time. In this study, we investigated whether emotional music is kept better in episodic long-term memory than less emotional music and to which extent musical structure is important.

Shared networks for auditory and motor processing in professional pianists: evidence from fMRI conjunction.

To investigate cortical auditory and motor coupling in professional musicians, we compared the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) activity of seven pianists to seven non-musicians utilizing a passive task paradigm established in a previous learning study. The tasks involved either passively listening to short piano melodies or pressing keys on a mute MRI-compliant piano keyboard. Both groups were matched with respect to age and gender, and did not exhibit any overt performance differences in the keypressing task.

Selective loss of timbre perception for keyboard and percussion instruments following a right temporal lesion.

We report the case of a 65-year-old man WDK, who experienced selective loss of timbre perception for keyboard and percussion instruments following a right temporal stroke comprising the anterior superior and medial gyrus and parts of the insular region. Formerly an avid listener to music, the sound of an orchestra appeared to be "flat" to him. WDK and a matched control subject underwent a detailed neuropsychological test battery covering basic auditory function (audiometry and just notable difference for pitch shifts), specific auditory function (recognition of environmental sounds), specific musical functions like discrimination of pitch, interval, contour, rhythm and metre, recognition of familiar melodies, emotional responsiveness, perception of timbre and auditory spectral analysis.

Focal dystonia in musicians: treatment strategies and long-term outcome in 144 patients.

We present the long-term outcome of 144 musicians with focal dystonia after treatment with botulinum toxin (n = 71), trihexiphenidyl (n = 69), pedagogical retraining (n = 24), ergonomic changes (n = 51), or nonspecific exercises on the instrument (n = 78). Outcome was assessed by patients' subjective rating of cumulative treatment response and response to individual therapies. Seventy-seven patients (54%) reported an alleviation of symptoms: 33% of the patients with trihexiphenidyl, 49% with botulinum toxin, 50% with pedagogical retraining, 56% with unmonitored technical exercises, and 63% with ergonomic changes.

Anxiety in musicians with focal dystonia and those with chronic pain.

Psychological conditions were studied in 20 musicians with focal dystonia and compared with 20 musicians with chronic pain and 30 healthy musicians using the Freiburg Personality Inventory and the Questionnaire for Competence and Control Orientations. Additional questionnaires focused on perfectionism and anxiety particularly with regard to the dynamics of these psychological features. Musicians with focal dystonia and those with chronic pain more often displayed anxiety than controls.

Quantification of focal dystonia in pianists using scale analysis.

Focal dystonia in pianists is a task-specific movement disorder that causes loss of pianistic skills and provokes irregularities in playing. So far, no method has been available for objective quantification of the disorder. Eight professional pianists with focal dystonia and eight healthy professional pianists matched by age, gender, and handedness were examined, using a newly developed MIDI-based Scale Analysis as well as the Arm Dystonia Disability Scale (ADDS).

Mapping perception to action in piano practice: a longitudinal DC-EEG study.

Background: Performing music requires fast auditory and motor processing. Regarding professional musicians, recent brain imaging studies have demonstrated that auditory stimulation produces a co-activation of motor areas, whereas silent tapping of musical phrases evokes a co-activation in auditory regions. Whether this is obtained via a specific cerebral relay station is unclear.

Cortical activation patterns of affective speech processing depend on concurrent demands on the subvocal rehearsal system. A DC-potential study.

In order to delineate brain regions specifically involved in the processing of affective components of spoken language (affective or emotive prosody), we conducted two event-related potential experiments. Cortical activation patterns were assessed by recordings of direct current components of the EEG signal from the scalp. Right-handed subjects discriminated pairs of declarative sentences with either happy, sad or neutral intonation.

Receptive amusia: evidence for cross-hemispheric neural networks underlying music processing strategies.

Perceptual musical functions were investigated in patients suffering from unilateral cerebrovascular cortical lesions. Using MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) technique, a standardized short test battery was established that covers local (analytical) as well as global perceptual mechanisms. These represent the principal cognitive strategies in melodic and temporal musical information processing (local, interval and rhythm; global, contour and metre).