Eriko Aiba, Assistant Professor, Department of Mechanical and Intelligent System Engineering

How the brains of musicians work while playing musical instruments and multimodal information processing.

Eriko Aiba, Assistant Professor, Department of Mechanical and Intelligent System Engineering

Assistant Professor Aiba is studying how the brains of musicians work while playing musical instruments and their strategies for processing huge amounts of multimodal information in parallel. In particular, musicians who use sight reading must process enormous amounts of information. Specifically, they must read the score, interpret the music, and search for the correct keys to play while planning the motion and control of their fingers. So one of the important areas of research is understanding how professional musicians complete such complicated information processing.

Furthermore, musicians have their own strategy in playing, even though it may appear that they all playing the piano in the same way. Notably, Eriko Aiba thinks that the strategies of musicians are not completely different, because many musicians display common traits. "In the future I would like to categorize professional musicians based on the type of information processing strategy used by their brains," says Aiba. "It may help musicians to find their own suitable ways of learning to play musical instruments."

This research is expected to contribute to many areas of research areas in exploring expertise and performance.

Further information

Eriko Aiba, Assistant Professor, Ph. D. (Musicology)
Department of Human Media Systems, Graduate School of Information Systems
The University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo.

Website:https://sites.google.com/site/aebaeriko/
Research Highlight:Information science offers insights into the performance of pianist: Efficiently reading piano musical scores by analyzing geometrical information in musical notes