Important insights into brain-behavior interactions have been gathered through research in experimental psychology and medical sciences, and the fields of neuroscience and movement sciences.
Nevertheless, scientific assessment of learning practices, and movement performance in professional musicians has received less attention. The high number of professional musicians suffering from health problems related to music-making calls for an in-depth scientific assessment of those movement parameters central to music performance at high levels of finger and hand dexterity.
Modern neuroscience, experimental psychology and medical and movement sciences are all giving compelling evidence to assume that these kind of investigations may lead to an important change in the way musicians select their learning strategies and practice behaviors.
It is hypothesized that scientifically-grounded learning strategies will drastically contribute to reduce the amount of physical exercise and, in so doing, to prevention of hazardous physical disorders of musicians.
For this particular case, scientific assessment can be only achieved through interdisciplinary work involving experimental psychology, medical sciences, neurosciences and music.
Professional musicians play a central role in this process, as they possess a vast and deep experiential knowledge necessary to delineate task-specific questions, which can be then regarded from a scientific perspective.
This project is a joint project between the Collegium Helveticum, the Department of Music Zurich University of Arts, the Electronics Laboratory of ETHZ, and the TableTop Interaction Laboratory (t2i Lab), Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) Chalmers TH, Gothenburg, Sweden. The project is founded by the Swiss National Science Foundation for a three years period.
Project leader:
Dr. rer. nat. Victor Candia, Collegium Helveticum
Prof. Dr. med. Horst Hildebrandt, Zürcher Hochschule der Künste
Project partners:
Prof. Gerhard Tröster, Electronics Laboratory
Wearable Computing Lab
Prof. Morten Fjeld
TableTop Interaction Laboratory (t2i Lab)
Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE)
Chalmers TH, Gothenburg, Sweden