While improvisation is considered to be an art form, particularly in jazz, but also in eighteenth-century music, it may also be seen as an didactic instrument which can be used to develop implicit knowledge of music syntax. Two types of syntax may be distinguished: finite state grammars and hierarchical …

The realization of one’s musical ideas at the keyboard is dependent on the ability to transform sound into movement, a process called audiomotor transformation. Using fMRI, we investigated cerebral activations while classically-trained improvising and non-improvising musicians imagined playing along …

of patients.

Parkinson’s disease is characterized not only by bradykinesia, rigidity, and tremor, but also by impairments of expressive and receptive linguistic prosody. The facilitating effect of music with a salient beat on patients’ gait suggests that it might have a similar effect on vocal behavior, however it …

The historically developed practice of learning to play a music instrument from notes instead of by imitation or improvisation makes it possible to contrast two types of skilled musicians characterized not only by dissimilar performance practices, but also disparate methods of audiomotor learning. In …

This essay addresses the relationship of improvisation and identity. Biographical research that was conducted by the author into professional musicians’ lifelong learning showed the huge importance of improvisation for personal expression. Musically, the concept of sound appeared to serve as a strong …

The functional and anatomical distinction between vision-for-perception and vision-for-action, the hallmark of the dual-stream Perception-Action Model, is equally applicable to the auditory domain, implying that non-conscious audition-for-action could play an important role in music performance. Ear …

Classical musicians are a unique population. Unlike other musicians, they learn their skills with the use of sheet music, right from the beginning. Investigation of brain response may help us understand how educational methods influence learning in this group of musicians. In this study, we hypothesized …