PD Dr Daniela Sammler | Neural bases of music production: EEG and fMRI evidence for a hierarchy of musical action planning in expert pianists

Over the past 20 years, research on the neurocognition of music has gained a lot of insights into how the brain perceives music. Yet, our knowledge about the neural mechanisms of music production remains sparse. The present line of research isolated distinct representational levels of musical action planning and their neural underpinnings during music performance in professional pianists using electroencephalography (EEG) and 3 Tesla functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Expert pianists imitated chord progressions without sound that were manipulated in terms of musical harmony and context length to assess high-level planning of sequence-structure, and in terms of the manner of playing to assess low-level parameter specification of single acts. The EEG and fMRI data converge on three main findings: (A) musicians’ motor plans operate primarily at the level of harmonic sequence-structure and are incrementally translated to lower levels of movement selection, (B) harmonic sequence-structure takes priority over the selection of finger movements in the musician’s left inferior frontal gyrus – an area thought to process syntactic structure in language, and (C) musical training in classical or jazz genre induces different experience-dependent biases towards low or high levels of action planning, respectively. Altogether, these results demonstrate a hierarchy of action planning in music performance in which harmonic structure acts as a scaffold that flexibly facilitates performance and enables pianists to achieve the motoric proficiency of their genre as required on stage.

Poster