van Vugt Floris Tijmen, Altenmüller Eckart
Department of Psychology, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada1.
Haskins Laboratories Inc., New Haven, Connecticut, United States2.
Adv Cogn Psychol. 2019 Sep 3;15(3):216-227. doi: 10.5709/acp-0271-5. eCollection 2019.
Music performance requires simultaneously producing challenging movement sequences with the left and right hand. A key question in bimanual motor control research is whether bimanual movements are produced by combining unimanual controllers or through a dedicated bimanual controller. Here, 34 expert pianists performed musical scale playing movements with the left or right hand alone and with both hands simultaneously. We found that for the left hand, scale playing was more variable when playing with both hands simultaneously rather than with one hand at a time, but for the right hand, performance was identical. This indicates that when task constraints are high, musicians prioritize timing accuracy in the right hand at the cost of detriment of performance in the left hand. We also found that individual differences in timing substantially overlap between the unimanual and bimanual condition, suggesting control policies are similar but not identical when playing with two hands or one. In the bimanual condition, the left-hand keystrokes tended to occur before right-hand ones, and more so when the hands were further apart. Performance of the two hands was furthermore coupled so that they tended to be early and late together, especially in the beginning and end of each scale. This suggests that experts are able to achieve tightly coupled timing of scale playing movements between the hands. Taken together, these findings show evidence for partially overlapping and partially separate controllers for bimanual and unimanual movements in piano playing.
音乐演奏需要同时用左手和右手做出具有挑战性的动作序列。双手运动控制研究中的一个关键问题是，双手动作是通过组合单手控制器产生的，还是通过专门的双手控制器产生的。在这里，34位专业钢琴家分别用左手或右手单独演奏音阶，以及双手同时演奏音阶。我们发现，对于左手来说，双手同时演奏音阶时比一次只用一只手演奏时更不稳定，但对于右手来说，两种情况下的表现是一样的。这表明，当任务限制较高时，音乐家会优先考虑右手的计时准确性，而以牺牲左手的表现为代价。我们还发现，单手和双手条件下计时的个体差异有很大重叠，这表明双手或单手演奏时控制策略相似但不完全相同。在双手演奏的情况下，左手按键往往比右手早，而且双手距离越远，这种情况越明显。此外，双手的表现是相互关联的，以至于它们往往同时过早或过晚，尤其是在每个音阶的开头和结尾。这表明专家们能够实现双手演奏音阶动作的紧密关联计时。综上所述，这些发现表明，在钢琴演奏中，双手和单手动作的控制器存在部分重叠和部分分离的证据。
