Music and action
pp. 157-180
in: Rolf Bader (ed), Sound - perception - performance, Berlin, Springer, 2013Abstract
Music performance includes planning, initiation, execution, monitoring, and correction of actions. This makes music performance a valuable tool for the study of human action and its neural correlates. This chapter reports action-related processes evoked by the perception of actions, and processes of error correction during music performance. Neuroscientific studies showed that, during the perception of action, neural systems are active that are also active during the performance of such actions. This supports the "common coding principle" stating that the late stages of perception and the early stages of action share a common representational format (such as the same neural code). Studies on music performance show that making an erroneous movement (such as playing an unintended note) is detected already before this movement is fully executed. This reflects that during action execution, several cognitive processes are carried out in parallel monitoring the movement, detecting deviations from an initial action program, and initiating corrective movements. In addition, studies investigating neural correlates of false feedback during playing show that neural correlates of error detection overlap strongly with those related to passive perception of such errors.