Trombonist’s Muscle Activity Studied Through Thermography

I’ve blogged about research conducted by Dr. Matthias Bertsch before.  He wrote a paper called Visualization of Trumpet Players’ Warm Up By Infrared Thermography that looked at how embouchure muscles got used by trumpet players at a different ability levels.  He’s more recently replicated this idea and applied it to the entire bodies of a violinist, saxophonist, and trombonist.  Here’s the trombonist’s video.

It’s neat to see which parts of this trombonist’s body heat up most after the warmup and playing for 80 minutes.  Her slide hand get’s dark red in the thermographic view, which doesn’t surprise me.  I was a little surprised that both arms and shoulders seemed to work about as much and showed similar heat patterns.  Thinking more about this, it is a good demonstration of the importance of the left hand grip for trombonists (and probably for trumpet players as well, I’m curious to see similar research done on a horn player regarding the left and right hand positions).

Her hot spots on her face were a little different from what I expected, but not too much.  Comparing it to the photographs in Bertsch’s trumpet study you can see that most players seem to do a lot of their embouchure work at their mouth corners.  With the trombonist you can see that it looks as if one mouth corner is working a bit harder than the other.  There was also a great deal of dark red from the middle of her forehead down to her nose, and not in ways that really resemble the experienced trumpet player in Bertsch’s earlier study.  It might be this particular trombonist isn’t so experienced (the less experienced players in the trumpet study showed a more asymmetrical pattern of warm regions).  Or possibly that more research is needed to see if the trumpet player’s patterns from earlier can be applied to all players in general.

I find it promising that while this sort of research has been used for athletic training for a long time, it is only fairly recently that researchers like Bertsch have been taking a scientific look to the biomechanics of musical performance. It will be interesting to see where the thermographic technology takes brass pedagogy when the technology becomes cheaper, easier to work with, and others begin to utilize it.