Elsevier

Neuroscience

Volume 164, Issue 2, 1 December 2009, Pages 822-831
Neuroscience

Systems Neuroscience
Research Paper
Effective utilization of gravity during arm downswing in keystrokes by expert pianists

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroscience.2009.08.024Get rights and content

Abstract

The present study investigated a skill-level-dependent interaction between gravity and muscular force when striking piano keys. Kinetic analysis of the arm during the downswing motion performed by expert and novice piano players was made using an inverse dynamic technique. The corresponding activities of the elbow agonist and antagonist muscles were simultaneously recorded using electromyography (EMG). Muscular torque at the elbow joint was computed while excluding the effects of gravitational and motion-dependent interaction torques. During descending the forearm to strike the keys, the experts kept the activation of the triceps (movement agonist) muscle close to the resting level, and decreased anti-gravity activity of the biceps muscle across all loudness levels. This suggested that elbow extension torque was produced by gravity without the contribution of agonist muscular work. For the novices, on the other hand, a distinct activity in the triceps muscle appeared during the middle of the downswing, and its amount and duration were increased with increasing loudness. Therefore, for the novices, agonist muscular force was the predominant contributor to the acceleration of elbow extension during the downswing. We concluded that a balance shift from muscular force dependency to gravity dependency for the generation of a target joint torque occurs with long-term piano training. This shift would support the notion of non-muscular force utilization for improving physiological efficiency of limb movement with respect to the effective use of gravity.

Section snippets

Participants

Seven active expert pianists (three males and four females, mean age±SD=24.3±3.2 years) with more than 15 years of classical piano training and seven novice piano players (three males and four females, age=21.0±4.6 years) with less than 1 year of piano training participated in the present study. All of the expert pianists had won awards at domestic and/or international classical piano competitions. In order to exclude the possibility that any differences in the keystroke motions across pianists

Time history curves

Representative mean time history curves of the muscular activities of the upper arm (biceps and triceps) muscles, elbow muscular torque and angular velocity at the forte and piano loudness by one of the experts and one of the novices are shown in Fig. 2. In the preparatory arm-lift phase, both the expert and the novice showed an increase in biceps muscular activity immediately prior to increases in flexion muscular torque and angular velocity at the elbow joint. Toward the end of the arm-lift

Discussion

The use of gravity to effectively reduce muscular work for the production of elbow extension muscular torque, independent of interaction torque arising from the surrounding joints and gravitational torque, was investigated using expert and novice players of the piano during the downward key-striking motion in the present study. The findings demonstrated a clear skill-level difference in coordination of upper arm muscular activity in relation to the production of elbow extension muscular torque.

Conclusion

In summary, a clear expert-novice difference in the activity of the muscles for the production of muscular torque at the elbow joint to drive a downswing motion of the arm in the present study indicated an expertise-dependent nature of gravity-muscular force interaction in piano keystrokes. The novices commonly used a muscular force-driven arm downswing so that a target tone could be constantly produced, whereas the experts relied heavily on a gravity-dependent drop of the arm while keeping the

Acknowledgments

We thank to Prof. Eckart ALTENMÜLLER (Hanover University of Music and Drama) for his critical comments and helpful and constructive suggestions on an earlier version of this manuscript. A part of the present study was supported by Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (Start-up). This work was also partly supported by SCOPE, MIC and SRPBS, MEXT.

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