Beatboxers’ and guitarists’ brains react differently to hearing music

The brains of professional beatboxers and guitarists respond to music differently when compared to each other and non-musicians, finds a new UCL-led study. The study, published in Cerebral Cortex and funded by Wellcome, sheds light on how learning and making music can affect mental processes. The researchers found that the area of the brain that controls mouth movements was particularly active when beatboxers listened to a previously unheard beatboxing track, while the 'hand area' of the guitarists' brains showed heightened activity when they listened to guitar playing. "Most research in this area has focused on classically trained musicians, who have had extensive tuition from a very young age, but we found that professional beatboxers and guitarists also display neural patterns typical of these expert classical musicians," said the study's first author, Dr Saloni Krishnan, who completed the study at the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience before moving to the University of Oxford. "We are excited by these findings because they indicate that experience of producing music changes the way we perceive it - perhaps explaining why professional musicians can hone in on technical expertise so easily to play complex pieces without having to think about each note," she added. The researchers brought in 60 people, evenly split between non-musicians, professional beatboxers and professional guitarists. The musicians had an average of 8-9 years of professional experience.