Motor-neurology MENU for expanding your practice

by Dr. Ben van Cranenburgh,
of stichting ITON (Institute for Applied Neurosciences)

Music learning strategies:
When a student has trouble progressing for one reason or another (even when they practice hard) it is good idea to take a look at other practice techniques. You can then discover if you can progress by switching over to a new learning strategy, thereby breaking through the learning block. Here is a short summary of learning strategies:

1. Slowly, slowly, slowly
In the music world “slow practice” is one of the main principles. Very effective, but not everyone has the patience for it. Slow practice is probably so effective because the brain needs more time to feel the positioning and placement of the fingers (kinesthesia) and to work them in to a clear memory. But it is also because there is little room given to playing wrong notes. Please note that slowing down does not work for all movements or sports for instance: high jump, skating, somersaults.

2. Chaining
Notes and measures can be chained together. The most usual is to forward chaining: begin at the beginning, then add a few measures each time. An enthusiastic amateur pianist can, for instance, play all the first pages of Beethoven sonatas but makes mistakes in later pages. Logical, because the beginning is more often practiced. Sometimes backward chaining can work wonders in practicing. Begin, for instance, by the final chord and then attach previous measures one by one. In practice we often use chaining in an intuitive way: when there is a difficult part we slowly add the preceding or following measures around it so that the difficult part becomes part of a whole.

3. Automation
Only when the movement becomes automatic can we direct our attention to the musical expression. That is why it is important to take a look at what factors can help in processing our movements so they become automatic. The most important aspect is much repetition; a passage that you play very little will of course not be automated. Sometimes, however, it can help to add a task, to have two tasks going on at once! The café-pianist has learned through this method to play the piano while he carries out a conversation. Many musicians can sing while accompanying themselves on the guitar: singing forces an automation of the guitar chords.

4. Variation
All musicians know that during practice it can sometimes help to vary how they play a passage. For instance, the fingerings for scales in different keys are different from each other. The same fingering for each scale would be deadly. Through variation the brain learns the underlying principle for all scales, a sort of “scale grammar”: a set of rules whereby you can, when the moment comes, generate the correct scale pattern. You vary your practice consciously in many ways: for instance rhythmic variation: short-long-short-long vs. long-short-long-short, or variation in tempo: faster, slower, or in dynamic: crescendo, decrescendo, etc. In our studies about motoric learning, the importance of variation is strongly stressed: keeping on repeating without variation is not a good strategy. Only through variation can you develop a reliable motoric grammar. (van Cranenburgh 2016)

5. Errorless learning
Errorless learning vs. learning from errors
We say: “you learn from your mistakes,” but that is not always true. Of course you hear a wrong note right away and this makes you stop and practice until the wrong note goes away. However that does not always work with music. Sometimes, or often, just because they occur sometimes, faults can catch and stick, and keep coming back in your practice. That is why it is sometimes a good idea to practice in a way that means that you cannot make any mistakes, especially from the start of learning a piece. For instance: practicing in a slow tempo with one chosen fingering, for pianists, practicing the right and left had separately…there are many techniques of errorless practicing.

6. Learning by Imitation
This is the most fundamental learning method. Our brain has a mirror-imaging system. This allows us to imitate what we see or hear in our own movements. (if you think about this it is a wonderful function of our brain!). Long before a child can understand language he can imitate it. Papa saws a piece of wood, the child imitates it with a plastic saw. Mother sings a song, the child sings after her. In this way we also take over our parents accents in speaking. Imitation is a powerful learning principle that can be used effectively in music lessons. Good if you can realize this, as it is often difficult in words to explain how you should sing or play something. Many aspects of playing or singing are not visible and therefore not able to be observed: for instance breathing (Chest? Stomach? Diaphragm?), articulation (tong), embouchure. The solution is then to demonstrate: the student imitates.

7. Implicit vs. Explicit learning
Explicit learning means that you now exactly what you are doing, that you practice from a precise knowledge of the needed movements: left hand in the 3rd position, bow close to the bridge, pressure on the string to be made by the first finger of the right hand. Sometimes this approach can trap students. They are only involved with their movements, and not with the music. Then it can help to push all the movement ideals to the side and just to play: implicit learning. Research in motor-learning shows that implicit learning is sometimes more effective than explicit learning. (“Sometimes” means that in the beginning of learning a new thing, explicit knowledge of how to do it is necessary: how do you hold the bow, where is third position in the left hand?)

8. Internal vs. external focus of attention
When a musician uses “internal focus” all attention is on the movement (the “performance”) and not on the goal of the movement (“result”). Playing a musical instrument or singing is often “playing with attention”: there are many facets where you can focus your attention, and you can change the focus of your attention depending on what you want to achieve. The clarinetist can focus his attention on: the right hand, the left hand, the embouchure, the fluidity and pulse, the intonation, etc. Sometimes the music is forgotten. Then it can help to shift your attention to the goal: the music itself.

9. Mental practice
Musicians often practice “mentally” to learn their part. They read the music, and do the fingerings in their thoughts, and/or form an image of the sound. That can be very effective. That is why we go more deeply into this technique in the next section.

Translation by C. Taylor of pages 113-115 of “Muziek en brein” by Dr. Ben van Cranenburgh This versions was made and posted with permission of the author.