Music signal processing by the human brains: Studies on the strategies used by professional pianists to efficiently sight-read music

Abstract

The human brain is an ingenious signal processing system. When musicians play instruments, their brains must process a huge amount and various types of information in parallel. Particularly, the sight-reading of piano music requires the processing of an enormous amount of information as piano music includes many chords and is written on the great staff (or grand staff). Pianists have to read the score, interpret the music, search for the keys to be played while planning the motions of fingers, and control their fingers. In addition, they must adjust the sound intensity and usage of the sustaining pedal according to the output sound. All these are performed simultaneously and successively. The sensory information or signals to be processed include many different modalities, such as visual, auditory, tactile, and motion sensing. In order to complete this complicated task, it is important that the pianists efficiently process this information. In this presentation, I introduce our experimental studies invest...