Muscle fatigue is considered as a risk factor for developing playing-related muscular disorders among professional pianists and could affect musical performance. This study investigated in 50 pianists the effect of fatiguing repetitive piano sequences on the development of forearm muscle fatigue and on piano performance parameters. Results showed signs of myoelectric manifestation of fatigue in the 42-electromyographic bipolar electrodes positioned on the forearm to record finger and wrist flexor and extensor muscles, through a significant non-constant decrease of instantaneous median frequency during two repetitive Digital (right-hand 16-tones sequence) and Chord (right-hand chords sequence) excerpts, with extensor muscles showing greater signs of fatigue than flexor muscles. In addition, muscle fatigue negatively affected key velocity, a central feature of piano sound intensity, in both Digital and Chord excerpts, and note-events, a fundamental aspect of musicians’ performance parameter, in the Chord excerpt only. This result highlights that muscle fatigue may alter differently pianists’ musical performance according to the characteristics of the piece played.

Trunk-Motion, Touch, and Articulation in Piano Performance contributed to creating forward linear velocities at the upper limb. The reported findings have implications for the performance, teaching, and research domains since they provide evidence of how pianists' trunk motion can actively contribute to the sound production and might not only be associated with either postural or expressive features.

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How do pictures make the world? In 1907 the Chinese fiction writer and social critic Lu Xun 魯迅 (1881-1936) essayed the thought that making the world depended on attunement towards beauty’s emotional vibrancy and on an imaginative frequency to scientific thought, both. This curatorial project asks after pictures made mostly during Lu Xun’s lifetime, in turn-of-the-century China, mostly by brush-and-ink painters, but also by embroiderers, photographers, cartoonists, taxidermists, map-makers, and others who worked self-consciously within the arts and sciences, popular or academic. Their pictures carry within them their own struggles with the rationalities of science, as well as emotions and imagination, to make the world. Still, as curators of each of the six thematic sections of the exhibition observe, the pictures also escape the hands of their makers; they are thrown back into the flow of time through the questions they pose of us now, questions that we hope will prompt us to see and sense nature and each other differently, and in doing so, to make our own world from a newly aware and nuanced perspective.