Pubmed Article/ Helene Grimaud

Pubmed article:

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

".....The mastering of a musical instrument requires some of the most sophisticated skills, including fast auditory as well as motor processing. The performance targets of the highly trained movement patterns are successions of acoustic events. Therefore, any self-monitoring during musical performance has to rely on quick feedforward or feedback models that link the audible targets to the respective motor programs. Years of practice may establish a neuronal correlate of this connection, which has recently been shown by brain imaging studies for both directions, auditory-to-motor, and motor-to-auditory.

• For auditory-to-motor processing: Professional musicians often report that pure listening to a well-trained piece of music can involuntarily trigger the respective finger movements. With a magnetoencephalography (MEG) experiment, Haueisen & Knösche [1] could demonstrate that pianists, when listening to well-trained piano music, exhibit involuntary motor activity involving the contralateral primary motor cortex (M1).

• For motor-to-auditory processing as a possible feedforward projection, Scheler et al. [2] collected functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) brain scans of eight violinists with German orchestras and eight amateurs as they silently tapped out the first 16 bars of Mozart's violin concerto in G major. The expert performers had significant activity in primary auditory regions, which was missing in the amateurs....."

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-read article in NYTimes about Helene Grimaud, a beautiful French classical concert pianist who divides her time between music studies and wolf conservation; mentioned that she spends most of her earnings on her wolf conservation efforts and therefore does not own a giant grand piano in her living room-revealed that she has no serious need for one as she does most of her practicing in her head, a technique which results in more spontaneity in her playing and also reduces the likelihood of phsyical injury.