Mental Practice and Memorization of Piano Music

Abstract

Piano performance majors attempted to play short, unfamiliar selections from memory after practicing for 10 min by playing the score, visually inspecting it, or listening to a recorded rendition while examining the score. When practicing mentally, subjects were encouraged to make use of visual, acoustic, and kinesthetic imagery. Independent experts rated performance on four dimensions that were intended to reflect the musicality as well as the accuracy of the performances. Physical practice led to the best performance. Listening to a model of ideal performance provided some benefit over visual inspection alone.

Mental Practice in Music Memorization: An Ecological-Empirical Study

“…A striking similarity between ours and Lim & Lippman's results appears in the ratings for Articulation and those for Dynamics, suggesting that short sessions of pure MP generally leads to immediate performances by memory that are musically no more than sufficient, lying around a score of 3 on a 1-7 rating scale. MP, even with a reasonable amount of time available, produced a poorer performance compared to PP, in agreement with preceding findings (Lim & Lippman, 1991;Highben & Palmer, 2004). Despite the general inferiority of MP compared to PP, the effectiveness of MP appears to be strongly influenced by subjects' familiarity with the basic mental practice operations.…”

“…Inter-rater reliability Compared with previous studies (Lim & Lippman, 1991;Theiler & Lippman, 1995), inter-rater reliability was considered high enough to warrant averaging the three raters' independent judgments for each performance score (Table 1).…”

“…Mental practice techniques for musicians include formal analysis of the score, listening to recording of the piece, auditory imagery of the pitches, movement imagination (visually and/or kinaesthetically), visual imagery of the score (Klöppel, 1996). Only few studies up to date were specifically addressed to test the effectiveness of MP in music performance; overall results show that mental practice is better than no practice but not as affective as actual practice (Lim & Lippman, 1991;Highben & Palmer, 2004). MP with an auditory model showed better results compared to MP alone (Lim & Lippman, 1991;Theiler & Lippman, 1995).…”

“…Only few studies up to date were specifically addressed to test the effectiveness of MP in music performance; overall results show that mental practice is better than no practice but not as affective as actual practice (Lim & Lippman, 1991;Highben & Palmer, 2004). MP with an auditory model showed better results compared to MP alone (Lim & Lippman, 1991;Theiler & Lippman, 1995). Combination of MP and PP appears to be particularly effective in the field of music, as shown by several experiments using different tasks and instrumentalist (Ross, 1985;Coffman, 1990;Kopiez, 1990;Theiler & Lippman, 1995;Cahn, 2007), leading to performance that are close or even indistinguishable from those following PP, also depending on the task (Theiler & Lippman, 1995).…”

“…In fact, MP has been reduced to: analytical pre-study of the score or listening to recording of the piece followed by analytical study (Rubin-Rabson, 1937); auditory plus kinesthetic imagery (Ross, 1985;Cahn 2007); imagery of sounds while pressing silent keys or imagery of the feeling of the movements while actually hearing the sounds or auditory plus kinesthetic imagery in the absence of any feedback (Highben & Palmer, 2004); visual plus auditory plus kinesthetic imagery, with or without auditory model (Lim & Lippman, 1991;Theiler & Lippman, 1995). Second, subjects were often asked to practice in unnatural situations: depending on the study, subjects had to avoid MP strategies other than the one prescribed (Highben & Palmer, 2004); they had to avoid any overt movement of the hand/fingers (Cahn, 2007;Ross, 1985) and avoid humming (Lim & Lippman, 1991); when included, audio-recorded version of the piece to be practiced played at fixed time intervals (Theiler & Lippman, 1995) or even continuously played for the entire practice time (Lim & Lippman, 1991;Highben & Palmer, 2004); subjects had very limited time windows to implement their MP (Cahn, 2007); participants had to practice the piece a fixed amount of times, without stopping or correcting mistakes (Highben & Palmer, 2004). The rationale of experimental control that lies behind all these constraints is reasonable and agreeable, and these controlled studies have proved valuable and converging results.…”