Tracking brain patterns in violinists
Violinists wear special caps while playing to display their brain activity
The season-opening concert for the Saskatoon Symphony Orchestra is giving the audience a unique look into the brains of musicians — with help from the University of Saskatchewan.
“It’s fun to show off the brain stuff for the public,” researcher Janeen Loehr said.
Researchers from the U of S psychology department analyzed the brain activity of musicians in the orchestra to try to understand how performing in a group has a positive influence on the minds of performers.
The project is one of the first between the organizations after a memorandum of understanding was signed by U of S president Peter Stoicheff and SSO executive director Mark Turner in 2017.
Loehr, one of the leads on this project along with fellow psychology researcher Jennifer Nichols, said they wanted to learn about how the brain reacts when it focuses on playing music in a group, and see if and how brain patterns between the musicians might sync up.
“Probably the most difficult part is actually analyzing the data and really analyzing the portion of the brain activity that is doing the specific part of the task we’re interested in,” Loehr said, adding that filtering out the regular brain activity from the “music” brain activity was a challenge.
During a May orchestra rehearsal, researchers attached electroencephalography (EEG) caps to four violin players — because violinist don’t move their faces much, which could impact the data picked up — and recorded their brain activity while the orchestra played Canadian composer Derek Charke’s Élan.
People in the audience of Saturday’s season-opening SSO concert have the chance to see a visual representation of the work done by Loehr and her team. Near the beginning of the concert, Loehr and Nichols will explain the research project to the audience before the orchestra plays Élan again with the brain-activity recordings showing on a screen, in sync with the musicians.
“What the audience will see ... is this changing colour pattern that represents whether the performer is focusing on themselves or other people,” Loehr said. “The most interesting thing so far is how much performers fluctuate over time.”
The symphony’s music director Eric Paetkau said it was “more fascinating than strange” to see what’s going on in the minds of his musicians displayed on a screen.
“I’ve always been interested in this sort of research, and how and why we do what we do as musicians,” he said. “This is something unique, something exciting, and ... a different way of looking at what we do every day.”
Paetkau also said Élan was a good choice of music for the project — with its fluctuating tempo and dynamic changes, the piece presents a reasonable challenge for the violinists in a short time, since the piece only lasts about two minutes.
The fascinating representation of brain-wave research is only the beginning, for both the researchers and the symphony’s first concert of the season. For Paetkau and the SSO, the demonstration is a short interlude in a concert that will also feature guest pianist Tony Yike Yang and the far more grandiose pieces Piano Concerto in C Minor by Rachmaninov and Brahms’ 2nd Symphony.
For Loehr and her team, this is the first research in what they hope will be a long project involving more data and more musicians. There is already some evidence that playing music with others has discernible positive effects on mental health, Loehr said — and the more that can be understood about music and the brain, the better it can be implemented for therapy and similar applications.
“Once we understand the brain mechanisms, then we can maybe design interventions ... which theoretically lead to more benefits of these kind of musical activities,” she said.