Musical creativity and the motor system

Across the neuroscientific literature, a surprisingly consistent finding in studies of musical creativity is the involvement of motor regions. These regions—premotor cortex, the supplementary and pre-supplementary motor areas, and posterior inferior frontal gyrus—are implicated in higher-level capacities, such as motor sequencing and planning, rather than primary motor control, and are furthermore implicated in cognitive capacities not directly linked to overt motor behavior. Nevertheless, their consistent implication in studies of musical capacities—from perception and performance to composition and improvisation—prompts a reconsideration of the musical faculty as one that is not merely auditory, nor even primarily so, but rather one that is fundamentally auditory-motoric.