RESEARCHER TAKES ON PIANISTS' INJURIES WITH DISKLAVIER

BUENA PARK, CA (May 16, 2003)—Imagine playing the piano at a professional level and suddenly having difficulty with passages you've been performing for many years. Imagine finding that your fingers don't follow the commands you are giving them, compromising your ability to play. Now, imagine that while treatments exist, there's no reliable diagnostic tool to direct you to them. That's been a reality for musicians who have focal hand dystonia.

Dr. Kathleen Riley videotapes a patient at the Miller Institute in New York as part of her Focal Dystonia diagnostic process.

Focal dystonia - a neurological movement disorder characterized by involuntary muscle contractions that force certain parts of the body into abnormal and sometimes painful positions - affects more than 300,000 people in the United States each year. Although it can affect anyone, it is particularly problematic for musicians because it affects the fine movement control required to play an instrument. The careers of several high-profile musicians, including pianists Gary Graffman, Leon Fleisher and, probably, the late classical pianist Glenn Gould, have been affected by focal dystonia.

Probably, that is, because of the difficulty in diagnosis. Until recently, there have been no effective diagnostic tools to confirm the diagnosis, which has made prescribing and evaluating treatment very difficult. Kathleen Riley, Ph.D., worked with a team of researchers in Hanover, Germany who designed a software program that has been shown to be a reproducible and accurate test for dystonia. This test has enabled the quantification of rehabilitative techniques including constraint therapy, botox and retraining. Although laboriously slow, the retraining techniques - some of which were developed by Laurent Boulet in Berlin - have enabled performers to return to performing.

With Yamaha's latest V-Sync technology for the Disklavier®, Riley has designed a new diagnostic and retraining tool. The V-Sync program, she says, enhances the German software in its ability to measure fine gradations of finger movement. The synchronization has enabled the development of Riley's biofeedback retraining technique, which allows patients to see the movements of their torsos, arms, hands and fingers while listening to play-back of their performance.

Riley will demonstrate her techniques at a special session at The Kathryn and Gilbert Miller Health Care Institute for Performing Artists at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center and New York University on June 4.

By videotaping patients' hands on the keyboard and using Yamaha software to sync the playback of both video and piano, Dr. Riley can pinpoint telltale signs of the disorder.

"Dystonia is task specific," Riley explains. "With the V-Sync, I can synchronize Disklavier recordings of pianists' performances with digital video recording. Then, along with a team of hand therapists, neurologists and other medical specialists, I can analyze movements of the fingers and hands on video while listening to the performance played back on the Disklavier. Quantified data can be obtained from highly technical piano performances in order to diagnose the severity and progress of the dystonia."

Riley is currently designing programs for evaluating technique, diagnosis, research and rehabilitative treatments for pianists with teams of doctors and hand therapists at the Miller Institute. Yamaha Artist Services is providing the Disklavier pianos at both sites. "The Disklavier, especially the Disklavier Pro, is so appropriate for this because it is an acoustic piano," Riley says. "Because the recording is so precise, we can obtain finer measurements of data. The release of the keys as well as the depression is measured in 10-bit precision. For diagnosis and treatment, there are a lot of things we need to be able to look at and measure, and with this instrument we can."

For more information about Yamaha pianos, write Yamaha Corporation of America, Piano Division, P.O. Box 6600, Buena Park, CA 90622-6600; email infostation@yamaha.com; visit www.yamaha.com or telephone (714) 522-9011.