Coarticulation and Piano: Spreading Information Through Music and Movement

While it only takes about a fifth of a second to produce a syllable as we rapidly move our lips, tongue and jaw in unison, meanwhile, the brain is coordinating movements in a very ingenious way so that all of these motions can adjacently create vowels and consonants, together.

This incredible working known as coarticulation helps ensure that speech is properly produced. At the same time, it spreads acoustic information about a vowel or consonant and helps a listener understand exactly what is being said.

Researchers wanted to see if this same knowledge could be applied to piano playing looking at similar effects on hands that are used to produce sounds while tapping the keys.

Study author Martha Flanders of the University of Minnesota and colleagues collected detailed data on the muscle movements of piano players, both amateurs and professionals. Their findings suggest that playing tje piano involves coarticulation with hand muscle contractions differing on the sequence of notes played.

For the study, the researchers recruited 10 healthy piano players, four of whom played professionally and the others were amateurs with the instrument. They were asked to play only right-handed notes of 14 different excerpts from 11 different musical pieces from composers, including Chopin and Bach. Pieces specifically chosen due to the right hand and a large number of notes preceded a subsequent number of keystrokes performed by the fingers, according to the study.

The researchers also collected a variety of data regarding keystrokes, how closely the metronome was used, muscle function and the skin of the subject's right hand.

Results showed that piano players do exhibit coarticulation in their finger movements while playing. This can be seen through muscle activity as the fingers hit the keys, which may say more about muscle movements and their relationship to activity in the cerebral cortex.

"This phenomenon may or may not be accompanied by coarticulation at the level of the motor cortex," the authors write, via a press release.

More information regarding the study can be found in the Journal of Neurophysiology.