Sensory feedback - Dependent neural de-orchestration: The effect of altered sensory feedback on Musician's Dystonia

Musician's dystonia (MD) is a task-specific movement disorder related to extensive expert music performance training. Similar to other forms of focal dystonia, MD involves sensory deficits and abnormal patterns of sensorimotor integration. The present study investigated the impaired cortical sensorimotor network of pianists who suffer from MD by employing altered auditory and tactile feedback during scale playing with multichannel EEG.

9 healthy professional pianists and 9 professional pianists suffering from right hand MD participated in an experiment that required repeated scale playing on a MIDI piano under altered sensory feedback while EEG was measured.

The comparison of EEG data in healthy pianists and pianists suffering from MD revealed a higher degree of inter-regional phase synchronisation between the frontal and parietal regions and between the temporal and central regions in the patient group and in conditions that are relevant to the long-trained auditory-motor coupling (normal auditory feedback and complete deprivation of auditory feedback), but such abnormalities decreased in conditions with delayed auditory feedback and altered tactile feedback.

These findings support the hypothesis that the impaired sensorimotor integration of MD patients is specific to the type of overtrained task that the patients were trained for and can be modified with altered sensory feedback.