A quick aside before I start today’s topic: I’d like to send a big two-fold thank-you to my MYC colleague Wendy Chan for directing many of you towards this blog, and also for the design of my beautiful header and background. Her assistance and encouragement have been instrumental in getting this blog off the ground.
In my last blog post, I described how explicit (conscious) and implicit (automatic) memories are both important for performing. In today’s post, I want to emphasize that practicing should always be conscious and deliberate. If we are playing music on automatic pilot, that is not actually practicing. The reason for this is that attention is required in order to learn anything.
A less effective method of practicing
Distraction limits our ability to learn
A study by Nissen and Bullemer in 1987 showed that if our attention is distracted while trying to learn a skill, we learn much more slowly, if at all. The study used a motor task where people had to press one of four buttons depending on where a light flashed on the computer screen. The lights flashed in a certain order, so after a while people learned where the next light would flash and got faster at pressing the correct buttons. This was an implicit learning task because at first the people didn’t even notice that there was a pattern to the light flashes, but they nevertheless were faster at pressing the buttons. The researchers asked a subset of people doing this task to do a second task at the same time: they heard a series of high and low tones and had to count the number of low tones. This group could not focus their attention on the flashing-light/button-press task. They were much slower at responding to the light flashes, and they did not get faster at pressing the buttons because they did not learn where the next light would flash. Distracting them with a counting task completely blocked their ability to learn the motor pattern.
This distraction effect definitely applies to practicing music. If your mind is not on your practicing, you are kind of wasting your time. There is a quote I love by the flutist Trevor Wye, who says: “It is almost useless to spend your allocated practice time wishing that you weren’t practising”.
Internal vs. External Focus of Attention
Well, then what exactly should we be thinking about while we’re practicing? What should we direct our attention towards? Research in a number of different fields has shown that an external focus works better than an internal focus. An internal focus directs our attention towards the workings of our own bodies: how we’re moving our fingers, arms, lips, etc. With an external focus, we’re thinking instead of the results of our movements. The effects of internal vs. external focus have been studied extensively in sports performance. Thinking about where we’re aiming our golf ball leads to a better swing than thinking about how we’re moving our arms to swing the golf club. For music this would mean that focusing on the sounds that we’re producing is more effective than thinking about how we’re moving our fingers.
A recent study in the Journal of Music Education has shown exactly this effect. The researchers, led by Robert Duke, taught music students a short keyboard passage, and instructed them to practice it and to make the notes as even as possible. The students were told to focus on either on the movements of their fingers, the movements of the piano keys, the movements of the piano hammers, or the sounds they were producing. The result was that those focusing on the sounds were the most even, while those focusing on their fingers were the least even. The more external the focus during practice, the better the performance.
Data from Duke et al. (2011).
This idea is directly applicable to music students. I often tell my students to be sure to listen to themselves. They especially need this reminder for practicing technical exercises such as scales, which can be rote and boring for younger students (and older ones too!). However, trying to make these exercises sound as beautiful as possible is a good way to focus attention on the exercise and lead to consistent improvements in evenness and tone.
Why does this work? Well, when we play exercises or songs we know well, we already have the movements stored in implicit memory. When we focus our attention on the movements, that conscious effort interferes with the automatic execution of the motor memory. However, if we focus on the results of the movements, that effort seems to fine-tune the motor memory, leading to a better rendition of the scale or song.
I’ll have more to say about attention in the next post, but the main point today is that focused attention is a critical component of music practice, and that, in general, we should focus on improving the sounds we produce.
References:
Nissen MJ and Bullemer P (1987). Attentional requirements of learning: Evidence from performance measures. Cognitive Psychology 19: 1-32
Duke RA, Cash CD, Allen SE (2011). Focus of Attention Affects Performance of Motor Skills in Music. Journal of Research in Music Education 59(1): 44-55.
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