Breaking down the musician’s minds: How small changes in the musical instrument can impair your musical performance

Abstract

The relationship between musicians and their musical instruments has influenced music engagement and musical structure across societies. In this work, we study how musicians react to changes in their instrument and the associations between keys and pitches using experiments that simulate the interface of the accordion. Seventeen accordionists, pianists and guitarists took part in the study. The results show accordion players are more affected by the changes in the musical interface than non-according players, for the same tasks. These observations support the extended cognition hypothesis, which proposes that coupled processes, such as the musician-instrument chain, count as an entire cognitive process.