“It's easy to play any musical instrument: all you have to do is touch the right key at the right time and the instrument will play itself.
-Johann Sebastian Bach
A study published in Neuroscience determined that woodwind-musicians and string-musicians have different underlying neurophysiological correlates in the primary motor cortices of their brains.
The research was conducted by Francesca Ginatempo, Nicola Loi and Franca Deriu at the University of Sassari, in Italy, and John Rothwell at the UCL Institute of Neurology, in London, UK.
When acquiring new information, the efficiency with which involved brain networks undergo adaptation and reorganization is called neuroplasticity.
Nerves relay information from the brain throughout the central and peripheral nervous systems. These nerves, in turn, stimulate muscles in order to produce motor movements. When this stimulation occurs, a distinct neural signal called a motor-evoked potential is fired.
Previous research has found that the primary motor areas of musicians’ brains are quicker to fire brain signals to the associated muscles, are more receptive to neuroplasticity through training, and show less interhemispheric inhibition at the cortical level (allowing for more efficient coordination of bilateral physical movements). However, much of the previous research in this area has focused exclusively on keyboard or string players, both of which require similar fine finger movements.
The main objective of the current research was to compare between different types of musicians whose instruments require fine motor movements of fundamentally different areas of the body: woodwind and string musicians. The regions that were examined for both woodwind musicians and string musicians were the areas specialized for face and hand movements, respectively. Of specific interest to the researchers was the intensity of excitation and sensitivity to neuroplasticity opportunities in these specific regions of the motor cortex.
The main hypothesis was that brain adaptations will occur at specific sites in the primary motor cortex depending on the instrument an individual plays, and that these changes would follow the motor properties of the hand and face.
Participants were divided into three groups: woodwind musicians (i.e., playing an instrument with an embouchure), string musicians (i.e., using all fingers to play an instrument) and non musicians. At the time the study was conducted, all musicians performed at the professional level and had begun training from an early age (between 8- and 12-years old).
Researchers used two methods to collect data: electromyography and transcranial magnetic stimulation.
Transcranial magnetic stimulation is applied to the scalp, over the motor cortex, using a coil that emits an electrical stimulus. This technique causes excitability changes in the motor cortex, which manifests as a motor-evoked-potential and is used to measure the excitability of the nerves that infiltrate the hand and face muscles.
Electromyography involves placing electrodes over a muscle in the hand (adjacent to the thumb) and a muscle that flanks the chin. The electrodes record the motor-evoked potentials (Hertz) at rest and during excitation (muscle contraction), and this measure assesses how much muscle stimulation occurs when the nerve is activated.
The experimental design consisted of three parts: excitability, inhibition, and neuroplasticity of the hand and face area of the primary motor cortex.
The results showed that woodwind musicians have greater interhemispheric inhibition in the facial brain area than do string- or non-musicians, suggesting that they have greater control over the precise asymmetrical movements of the lower facial muscles required to play their wind instruments.
It was also found that string-musicians have a greater amplitude motor-evoked-potential occurring from the hand area of the primary motor cortex, compared to woodwind-musicians and non-musicians. The researchers speculate that this is likely due to the fact that string instruments require more subtle movements of the fingers over the strings to evoke specific sounds, while woodwind instruments have their sound-altering holes in set locations.
This study demonstrates the malleability of the brain during development -- a lifetime of learning to play an instrument leads to distinct physiological differences in the structure and communication patterns in the musician’s brain.