Mental Effort When Playing, Listening, and Imagining Music in One Pianist’s Eyes and Brain

Abstract

We investigated "musical effort" with an internationally renowned, classical, pianist while playing, listening, and imagining music. We used pupillometry as an objective measure of mental effort and fMRI as an exploratory method of effort with the same musical pieces. We also compared a group of non-professional pianists and non-musicians by the use of pupillometry and a small group of non-musicians with fMRI. This combined approach of psychophysiology and neuroimaging revealed the cognitive work during different musical activities. We found that pupil diameters were largest when "playing" (regardless of whether there was sound produced or not) compared to conditions with no movement (i.e., "listening" and "imagery"). We found positive correlations between pupil diameters of the professional pianist during different conditions with the same piano piece (i.e., normal playing, silenced playing, listen, imagining), which might indicate similar degrees of load on cognitive resources as well as an intimate link between the motor imagery of sound-producing body motions and gestures. We also confirmed that musical imagery had a strong commonality with music listening in both pianists and musically naïve individuals. Neuroimaging provided evidence for a relationship between noradrenergic (NE) activity and mental workload or attentional intensity within the domain of music cognition. We found effort related activity in the superior part of the locus coeruleus (LC) and, similarly to the pupil, the listening and imagery engaged less the LC-NE network than the motor condition. The pianists attended more intensively to the most difficult piece than the non-musicians since they showed larger pupils for the most difficult piece. Non-musicians were the most engaged by the music listening task, suggesting that the amount of attention allocated for the same task may follow a hierarchy of expertise demanding less attentional effort in expert or performers than in novices. In the professional pianist, we found only weak evidence for a commonality between subjective effort (as rated measure-by-measure) and the objective effort gauged with pupil diameter during listening. We suggest that psychophysiological methods like pupillometry can index mental effort in a manner that is not available to subjective awareness or introspection.

Musical and Bodily Predictors of Mental Effort in String Quartet Music: An Ecological Pupillometry Study of Performers and Listeners

“…Our results showed that arm motion improved the fit of a model that already included technical difficulty, suggesting that it accounted for a unique part of the variance. These findings are in line with previous studies of musical effort, which show greater pupil dilation in overt performance than in listening or imagined performance, suggesting an increased demand on cognitive resources (O'Shea and Moran, 2019 ; Endestad et al, 2020 ). A remaining question is whether we can identify unique effects of motor exertion and the mental effort involved in motor control on pupil size.…”

“…In contrast, a recent study by Endestad et al ( 2020 ), also using pupillometry, showed a clear relationship between pupil size and degrees of mental effort during overt and imagined piano playing for a professional pianist as well as for listeners. This study also showed, using fMRI, differences in locus ceruleous activity for the same pianist as she played (in the scanner) two pieces of different difficulty.…”

“…Conversely, pupil constriction occurs during periods of distraction and mind wandering (Konishi et al, 2017 ). Individual differences in cognitive abilities such as working memory capacity also contribute to attention control (Unsworth and Robison, 2017 ; Endestad et al, 2020 ).…”

Perspectives of the brain mechanism for playing the piano in the light of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM)

“…From autonomic nerve and hormonal points of view, a research for piano-playing was performed for an internationally famous pianist by measuring functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), pupillometry and other markers. 9 As a result, positive correlations were found among pupil diameters, psychological situation and physical motions. By neuroimaging method, relationship of noradrenergic (NE) activity and mental music cognition were observed.…”

Sensorimotor Synchronization Increases Groove

“…Subjects also provided song familiarity and style preferences upon their first exposure to each stimulus to be modeled as random effects for the other ratings since they have been known to impact groove 23,24 . Participants' tapping performance and pupil sizes were recorded to assess differences in sensorimotor synchronization and cognitive load 25 , respectively. This served to situate our results among past findings demonstrating that increasing rhythmic complexity results in more variable (or less precise) tapping [26][27][28] and demands more cognitive resources especially when moving to music 27 .…”