Brain Activity of a Pianist: New Insights into Music & Neuroscience

SAN FRANCISCO — The gentle chords of a Claude Debussy prelude resonated in a darkened auditorium during a recital by pianist Nicolas Namoradze at the University of California, San Francisco, one evening in November 2026.

Above him, a translucent image of Namoradze’s brain appeared on a screen: electrical currents of varying wavelengths, associated with different levels of alertness, registered as colorful activity sweeping across the model like storm fronts on a weather map.

With each chord, clouds of green and blue would bloom, then fade as the sound diminished.

As the recital progressed with works by Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Alexander Scriabin, the softly rotating brain image displayed a complex choreography of signals that sometimes oscillated between different areas or flashed simultaneously across both hemispheres of the organ.

As a visual spectacle accompanying Namoradze’s crystalline performance, it was hypnotic: seemingly, an X-ray of virtuosity in action.

But for the scientists in the audience, attendees at a conference on the neuroscience of music and dance, it was more than mere entertainment.

It represented an advance in experimental design, opening possibilities in an area that has long eluded scientific study: how music activates the brain, not in listeners, but in the performers themselves.

It also served as a reminder of the value artists can bring to scientific research as active participants shaping studies of their craft.

Theodore Zanto, a neuroscientist at UCSF’s Neuroscape laboratory, creator of the “Glass Brain” animations, stated following the performance that he was both surprised and moved by the result. “What we have is probably the clearest real-time representation of what’s happening inside the brain during a piano performance,” he said.

Scientists have long been drawn to music as a window into the brain, as it concentrates numerous human capabilities into a single activity. It simultaneously involves perception, movement, memory, attention, and emotion. It develops over time and requires constant prediction and adjustment. Rhythm, in particular, has become a focus of research due to its relationship to language development, motor coordination, and brain health.

However, a central question has remained elusive: what happens in the brain of a performer while they play?

Traditional brain imaging tools, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), require subjects to remain motionless in a scanner. More recent portable technologies, like electroencephalography (EEG) headsets equipped with electrodes, allow for studying musicians in more natural settings. However, capturing meaningful data requires dozens of repetitions of the same performance, synchronized to the millisecond.

This is where Namoradze, a February 10, 2026 featured artist in The New York Times, contributed a methodological breakthrough. The 33-year-old, award-winning pianist also holds a degree in neuropsychology. The result is images of astonishing clarity, as well as a series of new questions for scientists to consider.

Experiences

Namoradze is not the first musician to use Glass Brain, developed to monitor and control certain cognitive functions in closed-circuit video games. Mickey Hart, drummer for the Grateful Dead, has used it to improvise live on stages such as the Sphere in Las Vegas and the Hayden Planetarium in New York.

Namoradze contacted the Neuroscape team hoping to record videos that would visualize how his brain activity changed as he played pieces with different moods and structures.

Addressing a conference of researchers the day of his San Francisco recital, Namoradze recalled the initial, sobering reaction from Zanto. “This is a science outreach project,” Namoradze recounted Zanto telling him. “It’s fun, but it’s not real research.”

From an experimental standpoint, the difficulty wouldn’t be in reproducing a pianist’s brain activity. Rather, obtaining data that would support real research involved separating the processes related to musical creation from the array of electrical currents caused by other factors, such as digestion.

To extract the signal from the noise, researchers would need to capture multiple EEG readings of Namoradze playing the same piece so that meaningful neuronal signals could emerge. And those measurements would need to be almost perfectly aligned in time.

Andrea Protzner, a neuroscientist at the University of Calgary who ultimately collected Namoradze’s data, explained in a phone interview that the required precision is why EEG studies have thus far focused on listening to music in the laboratory. “EEG has millisecond precision,” she said. Only that level of precision allows signals related to events—in this case, music-related activity—to be clearly distinguished from noise caused by accidental muscle movements and other stimuli.

“That’s easy with listeners, who can hear the same recording over and over,” she said. “With a performer, it’s incredibly difficult.”

Initially, Namoradze considered studying his brain while listening to a recording of himself or visualizing himself performing. But he then arrived at a solution to the reproducibility problem that was within reach. A Steinway Spirio piano can capture every detail of a performance and reproduce it, note for note.

In Protzner’s lab, Namoradze wore an electroencephalographic cap while recording his program and then played it several times, virtually “syncing his fingers” with the playback of his recording on the piano. “I forgot I wasn’t playing,” Namoradze said. “My muscles were doing the same thing; I was hearing the same thing. I was able to embody my own ghost.”

Study

Namoradze’s project is part of a growing collaboration between scientists and musicians to study performance in more real-world conditions. Artists help formulate the questions and often design the study as an educational theater. For example, composer Anthony Brandt of Rice University collaborated with José Luis Contreras-Vidal, a neuroscientist at the University of Houston, to bring EEG imaging to a concert stage, equipping a pianist and a conductor with brain sensors during a live performance. The results revealed both synchrony and divergence between their brains: patterns that corresponded to their distinct musical functions.

Experiments based on performance like these pose challenges for scientific control, Brandt acknowledged, but argues that the alternative may be an anemic shadow of real-life practice: for example, asking pianists to improvise on small plastic keyboards inside a functional MRI, or improvisation studies where participants tap rhythms for 15 seconds at a time. “Scientists often want music to behave,” Brandt said. “But music isn’t meant to be bland. It’s meant to be a representation of human expression in all its splendor.”

Spectacle

Namoradze conceived of his neurorecital as a lecture-concert combining live performance with brain visualizations generated from his lab sessions in Calgary. During the recital in San Francisco, he paused the video to describe what he believed he was seeing: gentle flashes of activity in Debussy, complex coordination between different regions in Bach, bursts of movement between planning and execution in Beethoven. In Scriabin’s music, he noted a remarkable increase in activity in the occipital lobe, where vision is processed. Could it be, he wondered, that the composer’s synesthesia—his association of sounds with colors—was somehow encoded in the sonata?

Many of Namoradze’s ideas remain speculative, awaiting further research. But the questions he raises stem from a deep connection to the music. For the scientists, they are a stimulus. “He’s literally generating hypotheses for us,” Zanto said after the recital. “Do I think there was synesthesia?” Protzner asked. “No. But was it more associated with colors for him than the other pieces? Absolutely.”

Distinguishing performance from evidence, the researchers said, will require comparative studies: of other pianists playing the same repertoire, or of brain measurements of listeners alongside those of the performers. However ingenious Namoradze’s Spirio trick, it may not work for all pianists. Many amateurs would struggle to maintain that level of precision, even syncing their fingers with a player piano. And many concert pianists are too physically active for EEG studies where data is contaminated by the slightest head movement. (“Everyone was amazed at how still he played,” Protzner recalled of the hours Namoradze spent playing in her lab.)

But as Zanto and his team prepare to analyze the data generated by the neurorecital and begin drafting the study for scientific publication, Namoradze is already looking at the bigger picture. At Neuroscape, there is talk of building a “Body of Crystal” using measurements of a dozen physiological parameters—heart rate, skin conductance, digestion—to create animated models of the swirling activity within a human being over time. Analyzing the vast datasets that such modeling would require is still a dream, Zanto said. But once that technology exists, Namoradze is ready to return to the lab. He hopes, he said, that a Body of Crystal will make visible the communication between the brain, hands, and feet that turns musical intention into movement.

c.2026 The New York Times Company