Training the Musical Brain

Hands Together

2012-03-08T13:58:00.000-08:00

Not long after I started writing this blog, I received an email from one of my piano moms asking why it is that we always start by learning new songs “hands-separately”. That is, I usually tell the kids to learn the right hand part and the left hand part separately before they try to play them both at the same time. This mom is an occupational therapist and, as such, part of her job is to help people learn or relearn movements. And she knows that there is a whole field of research showing that when we practice only a part of a movement task, or when we practice a movement out of context, it doesn’t always translate to good performance of that movement in the whole task. What this means for pianists is that playing the right hand by itself is not really the same as playing the right at the same time as the left hand. So why do we practice hands-separately? To be honest, I have my students practice like this because that’s the way I learned to play the piano. Practicing songs hands-separately is standard procedure for pianists, but is it really the best way?

Splitting our attention

There are two different aspects to playing hands-together that make it particularly difficult. The first is that when we play piano with both hands, the right hand part and the left hand part are competing for our limited attentional resources. For each hand, we have to figure out what key(s) on the piano to play and what rhythm to play for each note, in addition to details like dynamics and articulation. There’s only so much attention to go around, so it’s hard to focus on all of that for both hands. Attention is a key part of learning, so if we split our attention between the two parts, they will be harder to learn than if we practiced just one part at a time. That is, it might take longer to learn the piece if we only practice hands-together, because we just can’t focus on all the individual details. If we are learning only one part at a time, there is still lots to focus on, but it’s more manageable than trying to spread our attention among all those different aspects of the music for two separate piano parts. Once we’ve learned one part on its own, it becomes more automatic, and we don’t have to use as much attention while we’re playing it. So from this point of view, it absolutely makes sense to learn each hand’s part separately, and then put them together. And this is clearly why the hands-separate approach is so popular.

Inhibiting the other hand

The second thing going on when playing hands-together is interhemispheric communication. In general, the left side of the brain controls the right hand, and the right hemisphere of the brain controls the left hand. However, the two hemispheres talk to each other, and what usually happens is that one hemisphere inhibits the other. When we play with our left hand, our right motor cortex is active, and it not only sends motor commands to our left hand, but it also sends commands to the left motor cortex, telling it not to move the right hand. And vice versa when we play with our right hand.

This occurs because humans have a natural tendency for mirror movements: when one hand moves, the other hand automatically mirrors its movements. This is seen in infants and young children, but as we develop motor control, we learn to stop these mirror movements: the motor cortex of each side of the brain gives off axons that travel through the corpus callosum (the thick fiber band that connects the two sides of our brains) to inhibit the motor cortex of the other side. This interhemispheric inhibition is particularly pronounced when we’re only using one hand. In other words, if we are playing the piano with only one hand, our motor cortex is inhibiting the motor cortex of the opposite side. So, if we’re practicing only the right hand part of a piano piece, we’re probably learning to inhibit the left hand. And when we learn the left hand part by itself, we’re probably learning to inhibit the right hand. Is it any wonder then, that when we go to play the song hands-together, it’s still really difficult? Perhaps all this hands-separate practice is a little bit counterproductive.

So, hands-separately or hands-together?

The question, from a practical standpoint, is how do we balance these two issues? Do we learn our songs hands-separately first so we can maximize our attention on each part while we’re learning them, or do we learn them hands-together from the beginning so that we can minimize interhemispheric inhibition?

Research that specificially addresses this issue is surprisingly scarce. There are a couple of old, old music studies that do look at exactly this question: Is it better to learn piano pieces hands-separately or hands-together?

Hands-together practice is more efficient

In a self-study published in 1933, Roberta Brown learned 3 pairs of piano pieces. In each pair, she learned one piece by starting hands-separately, and one by practicing hands-together. She found that it was more efficient, and also more enjoyable, to practice using the hands-together method.

Rubin-Rabson’s study from 1939 also concluded that practicing hands-together was more efficient, with one hands-together playthrough of a piece equivalent to practicing the right hand part twice, and then the left hand part twice (rather than equivalent to practicing once with each hand, as you might expect). This implies that hands-separate practice is inefficient. However, the subjects in this study were trained musicians, able to learn the pieces to a fully memorized level in two practice sessions. If the pieces were more difficult to learn, I think that would increase the amount of attention required for playing hands-together. In that case, the hands-together method might lose some of its advantage. Also, Rubin-Rabson points out that speed of learning is not the most important goal; clarity and precision of playing are also key, and seem to be improved by practicing hands-separately.

There is one other study that I read that points to an answer to the hands-separately or hands-together question. It’s a paper authored by Robert Duke and colleagues. In this study, a number of pianists were given an excerpt to practice, and the researchers looked at what sort of practicing behaviours were used and what led to the best performance. One of the conclusions was that the best performances came from pianists who played hands-together early on in the practice session.

As far as I can tell, there aren’t any more recent studies on this issue, and the standard method of learning piano pieces is still the hands-separate method.

Here’s my conclusion from all this morass of information: I suggest that we encourage students to start playing their pieces with both hands as soon as possible. If a new piece is difficult, it may be beyond the attentional limits of the student to play it hands-together immediately – this will just lead to frustration. In that case, the student could play through each hand's individual part (or focus on tricky bits in each hand), and then try again hands-together. Or perhaps practice just the left hand alone, and then try with both hands. This approach has the advantage of limiting inhibition between the two sides of the brain, and also stretching the attention capacity of the mind. The more we try to play hands together, the better we get at paying attention to all those notes at once. This can only help our hands-together sight-reading abilities.

I think the bottom line is that, although there’s certainly value in hands-separate practicing to focus on details, we don’t really improve at playing hands-together by practicing hands-separately. This is definitely a different approach than the one I was taught with, and it’s not really what I’ve been doing with my own students. But I’ve also noticed that my own children are always eager to play their pieces hands-together before they know them well hands-separately, because it’s more satisfying to hear both parts at once. And we could argue that satisfaction in playing is really what it’s all about.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this topic.

References

Brown RA. (1933). The relation between two methods of learning piano music. Journal of Experimental Psychology. 16:435-441.

Duke RA, Simmons AL, Cash CD. It’s Not How Much; It’s How: Characteristics of Practice Behavior and Retention of Performance Skills. Journal of Research in Music Education. 2009;56(4):310-321.

Hiraga CY, Garry MI, Carson RG, Summers JJ. (2009) Dual-task interference: attentional and neurophysiological influences. Behav. Brain Res. 205(1):10-18.

Rubin-Rabson G. (1939) Studies in the psychology of memorizing piano music. I. A comparison of the unilateral and the coordinated approaches. Journal of Educational Psychology. 30(5):321-345.

Vercauteren K, Pleysier T, Van Belle L, Swinnen SP, Wenderoth N. (2008). Unimanual muscle activation increases interhemispheric inhibition from the active to the resting hemisphere. Neurosci. Lett. 445(3):209-213.

Imagining music

2012-03-01T12:46:00.000-08:00

I’m walking the kids to the bus-stop when my 9-year-old, Sophia, inquires, “You know how you can hear songs in your head?”

“Uh-huh.” (The song on endless loop in my head at that moment is, annoyingly, the children’s song Do you know the muffin man?)

“Well, can you hear two notes at once in your head?”

I pause to imagine a perfect fifth, which, true to my early 80’s musical training, always sounds like the opening notes of the Chariots of Fire theme. “Yep, I can hear two notes at once. Or more. I can hear a major triad. Or a minor triad.”

The kids both look as if they’re listening to something I can’t hear, and, nodding, they confirm that they too can hear triads in their minds. Sophia still looks puzzled, though. She cocks her head to the side and asks, “We can’t sing two notes at once, so why can we hear two notes at once?”

As with many questions the kids ask me, I’ve never thought about that before. What the kids and I are discussing (and doing) is a form of auditory imagery. I’ve blogged before about involuntary musical imagery, or earworms, but what we’re talking about here is voluntary musical imagery, or what many musicians call audiation, the purposeful mental reconstruction of musical sounds. The ability to audiate is an important skill for musicians. If we can hear a song in our heads, we can use this representation to help us learn how to play it. If we don’t know how a song “goes” then it’s much harder to tell if we’re playing incorrect notes. Audiation is especially useful during sight-reading.

But what about the two-notes-at-once question? Our vocal cords are not able to produce more than one note at a time, but that doesn’t mean our brains can’t represent two (or more) notes at once. In fact, research has shown that when we hear music in our minds, the parts of the brain that are activated are very similar to those activated when we hear music.

It’s tricky to study audiation because there is no systematic way to prove that it is actually occuring – it’s all in the person’s mind, after all. A classic type of study was conducted by Kraemer and colleagues in 2005. They put subjects into an fMRI scanner and played them excerpts of familiar and unfamiliar songs. This activated the primary auditory cortex and auditory association cortex of the listeners. To induce audiation, the songs were then replayed with silent gaps replacing short sections of music. In the familiar songs, the silent gaps led to activation of these auditory areas. The participants confirmed that during the gaps in familiar songs, they could hear a continuation of the music in their mind. The researchers concluded that the activation in the auditory areas of cortex was the source of the audiated songs.

Because we can hear two notes at once, we can also imagine two notes at once, using our versatile auditory association cortex.

Reference:

Kraemer DJM, Macrae CN, Green AE, Kelley WM. (2005) Musical imagery: sound of silence activates auditory cortex. Nature 434(7030):158.

Musical Cognition

2012-02-24T09:59:00.000-08:00

I’ve just finished reading Henkjan Honing’s Musical Cognition: A Science of Listening. Although I had low hopes for another book about how we process music, written for the layperson, I found it to be a little gem of a book, with bite-sized, digestible chapters.

And many of the chapters did require a bit of chewing and digestion. The book is indeed written for the layperson, eschewing jargon and complicated figures, but that does not mean that Honing assumes (as many authors seem to do) his reader to be uneducated or slow-witted. On the contrary, Honing allows the reader space to consider and contemplate as he carefully but conversationally guides the reader through such knotty problems as “What is music” and “How do we recognize beat and meter in music?”, referring to his own research and that of others to describe approaches to answering these questions. I admit that I didn’t always feel like thinking that hard, but it was well worth the effort.

In the end, one of main points of this book is that we are all trained listeners, with a lifetime of experience at listening to music. The "illiterate" listener, lacking formal musical training, is almost as good at listening to and understanding music as a professional musician, but is not able to put names on all he hears. What the illiterate listener lacks is mostly musical vocabulary.

Far from being the fluffy read I anticipated, this book was thoughtful and thought-provoking. I’d love to sit down with Honing and discuss the questions raised in this book over several cups of coffee.

Music makes us happy

2012-02-16T13:41:00.000-08:00

It’s 2:55 on a Monday, and, as usual, I’m standing in the hallway at the elementary school, waiting for the 3:00 bell to ring and the children to come pouring out of their classrooms. Another mom stops to chat with me, and says, with no preamble, “Okay, what would you say are the top three benefits to studying music?” The subtext here is clearly: Is all this effort worthwhile?, a thought that is common to parents of young children studying music, and one I'm definitely familiar with. Because it really is a lot of work for parents to encourage, motivate, schedule and nag their children to practice every day.

As I said last week, I really feel the number one reason to study music is for the joy of it, but it’s clear that not every second of practicing will bring you joy. In fact, many of the minutes of practicing are just hard work, and not pleasurable at all, especially for young children who don’t really see that there is a worthwhile goal far down the road from all this effort. One of the jobs of the teacher and parent, of course, is to try to bring the goals closer and give children some satisfaction from small accomplishments.

Music Improves Mood

But it made me think: Is there any real scientific evidence to show that music makes you happy? Well, happiness is kind of difficult to measure scientifically, isn’t it? There are some standard questionnaires that can be given to people to assess mood, and, using these, it has been shown that singing (either in a choir or individually) improves people’s mood. In addition, just listening to music can improve your mood, and has been shown to activate the pleasure centres of the brain. Music therapy has been shown to improve mood in patients with dementia, stroke, cancer, traumatic brain injury, and depression. So clearly, yes: music makes people happy.

Physiological Effects of Music

There is also a body of research showing that music (either making it or listening to it) can cause physiological changes in our bodies, such as decreasing stress levels, causing our blood vessels to dilate, boosting our immune response, and acting to reduce our pain perception. The majority of this research has been performed simply by having people listen to joyful or relaxing music, and doing before-and-after measurements of things like saliva cortisol levels (to measure stress), or saliva immunoglobulin levels (to measure immune response).

The Autonomic Nervous System

How does music entering our ears manage to affect our body? It kind of sounds like hippie mumbo-jumbo, but there is a good anatomical explanation. A lot of our bodily functions are looked after by the autonomic nervous system (ANS). The ANS is made up of nerves that talk to our internal organs -- heart, lungs, glands, blood vessels, etc. The main role of the ANS is keep all our bodily functions chugging along at a relatively even keel, so that if, for example, our heart rate starts getting too fast, the ANS will try to slow it back down to the right speed. But what sets what the “right speed” is? That’s the job of the hypothalamus, a part of the brain that is the master control centre for the ANS. It uses input from the body and from the other parts of the brain to decide exactly what all our organs should be doing. The hypothalamus has direct connections with the emotional parts of our brains, so if we’re happy, that affects how our body functions.

Does musical training make you happier?

If all these benefits can be had simply by listening to music, is there extra benefit to performing the music? Is all this musical training worth it? I certainly think so, but what does the research say? I was surprised to find very little research on whether musical training increases overall happiness, but as I mentioned, happiness is something that’s tricky to study.

Here’s what I did find: a recent study conducted in Thailand showed that students with musical training had much lower levels of stress hormones right before a stressful math exam than students without musical training. The researchers concluded that musicians were more emotionally stable.

Another study compared professional vs. amateur musicians and investigated whether they reported having “peak experiences”, defined as “experiences of ego transcendence, glimpses of higher consciousness lying beyond ordinary daily experience”. The study found that professional musicians were more likely than amateurs to report having these transcendent experiences, and that performing music caused these moments, in both professionals and amateurs. I can certainly relate, and I'd be curious to know how non-musicians would compare with these two groups of musicians.

Despite the lack of research, I would argue that people with musical training are more likely to listen to music and more likely to be made happy by listening to music. Simply put, being a musician brings more music into your life. And the satisfaction of making music yourself cannot be denied. I keep getting sidetracked to the piano today because all this talk of how enjoyable music is makes me just want to go and play music.

Oh, yes...

And the second and third of the top three benefits of music training? I would say they are the improvements to executive function and to verbal skills, which I really will get around to blogging about one of these days.

References:

Beck RJ, Cesario TC, Yousefi A, Enamoto H. (2000). Choral singing, performance perception, and immune system changes in salivary immunoglobulin A and cortisol. Music Percept. 18:87-106.
Bernatzky G, Presch M, Anderson M, Panksepp J. (2011). Emotional foundations of music as a non-pharmacological pain management tool in modern medicine. Neurosci Biobehav Rev. 35(9):1989-1999.
Grape C, Sandgren M, Hansson L-O, Ericson M, Theorell T. (2003). Does singing promote well-being?: An empirical study of professional and amateur singers during a singing lesson. Integr Physiol Behav Sci. 38(1):65-74.
Khalfa S, Bella SD, Roy M, Peretz I, Lupien SJ. (2003). Effects of relaxing music on salivary cortisol level after psychological stress. Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sci. 999:374-376.
Kreutz G, Bongard S, Rohrmann S, Hodapp V, Grebe D. (2004). Effects of choir singing or listening on secretory immunoglobulin A, cortisol, and emotional state. J Behav Med. 27(6):623-635.
Laohawattanakun J, Chearskul S, Dumrongphol H, et al. (2011). Influence of music training on academic examination-induced stress in Thai adolescents. Neurosci. Lett. 487(3):310-312.
Menon V, Levitin DJ. (2005). The rewards of music listening: Response and physiological connectivity of the mesolimbic system. NeuroImage. 28(1):175-184.
Miller M, Mangano CC, Beach V, Kop WJ, Vogel RA. (2010). Divergent effects of joyful and anxiety-provoking music on endothelial vasoreactivity. Psychosom Med. 72(4):354-356.
Travis F, Harung HS, Lagrosen Y. (2011). Moral development, executive functioning, peak experiences and brain patterns in professional and amateur classical musicians: Interpreted in light of a Unified Theory of Performance. Consciousness and Cognition. 20(4):1256-1264.

Music Training and IQ

2012-02-09T14:08:00.000-08:00

No one doubts it: Parents have a hard job. In addition to all the day-to-day cooking, cleaning, cajoling, and ferrying kids about, parents have to make big decisions about what’s best for their child. We all want our kids to be well-adjusted, happy, and living up to their potential. And one of the trickier minefields to maneuver through is the choice of extra-curricular activities. Dance, swimming, drama, a multitude of team sports, martial arts, chess club, scouts, Mandarin class, gymnastics, the list goes on. Oh, and did I mention music? The parent has to weigh out the time involved, the child’s eagerness to participate, and the potential benefits to the child.

Does music training make you smarter?

Which is, of course, where I’m going with this. It’s hard to nail down all the benefits of musical training, but one that keeps coming up again and again is the idea that musical study makes people smarter. But does it? A few weeks back I advised you to take research about music and IQ with a grain of salt. Ask around, and you’ll hear that people who study music are smarter overall than people who don’t, and the common assumption is that the musical training itself contributes to the increase in IQ. But the causation could run the other way too: people who are smarter are more likely to take and stick with music lessons. The basic question is this: Does studying music make people smarter OR do people study music because they are smarter already?

The only way to really test this question is by a longitudinal study, where people are randomly assigned to either receive music lessons or not, and the effects on IQ are studied. In the last decade, there have been a couple of good studies that have investigated this question.

Figure from Schellenberg (2004).

Music training leads to a greater increase in IQ

The first, a study by Glenn Schellenberg at the University of Toronto was published in 2004. In this study, 6-year-old children were placed into four different groups: piano classes, voice classes, drama classes, or no classes. The children were given IQ tests at the beginning of the study, and at the end, after 36 weeks of classes. All groups showed an increase in IQ, which is expected, because they were 9-10 months older, and had been attending school during that time. But here’s the key result: children taking music (piano or voice) classes had a slightly larger increase in overall IQ compared to control or drama students. The researchers made sure there were no overall differences in the parent’s socio-economic status between the four groups, and included the drama class control group to prove that it was specifically music and not extracurricular activities in general that improved IQ.

Music training causes structural brain changes

In 2009, a similar study was published by a group of scientists in Boston. In this study, there were only two groups: one group received 15 months of keyboard lessons, and the second group received no lessons. The children were given a set of behavioural and IQ tests before and after the 15 months and it was found that keyboard training increases performance on finger fine-motor tasks and melodic and rhythm discrimination tasks. However, this study found that there were no significant differences in IQ between the two groups of children. This result may be due to the small number of children in this study. Only 31 children were studied, compared to 144 in the Schellenberg study. When the differences to be observed are small, a large number of test subjects is required.

The Boston researchers went one step further and performed MRI brain scans of the children before and after the 15 months of training. Amazingly, they were able to show that musical training causes structural changes in children’s brains. Children who had 15 months of keyboard lessons had more growth in the following areas (compared to children with no music training):

The corpus callosum, which connects the two sides of the brain
The right primary auditory cortex, which processes sound information
The right motor cortex, especially the hand area, which controls the left hand
The left and right frontal cortex, involved in working memory and the processing of harmony and tonality

So musical training causes changes in the brain, but for the most part, these changes occur in the places that one would expect, the parts of the brain that are involved in music processing and production. Does growth in these parts of the brain lead to improvements in overall intelligence? I would argue that it could, especially growth in the frontal cortex. As I reported back in November, the frontal cortex is involved in a variety of general-intelligence skills known as “executive functions”, and these have been shown to improve in preschoolers taking music classes. Increased connectivity between the two sides of the brain through an enlarged corpus callosum could also contribute to improved mental processing. And a more finely-tuned auditory cortex could allow for improved verbal skills. In sum, structural changes in the brain caused by musical training could certainly underlie a small increase in general intelligence.

But is this really the main benefit of musical training?

I should reemphasize that this 2009 study did not find any overall increases in IQ. I think most researchers believe that the enhanced brain growth and rewiring caused by musical training results in an increase in overall intelligence, but the effect is small. If we only focus on the benefits of musical training on intelligence, I think we are missing the boat. Music offers so much more than this: a vehicle for self-expression, training in self-discipline, solace, an opportunity to stand up in front of people and perform, a chance to be really good at something.

Personally, I want my children to study music simply for the joy of making music. There’s nothing like it.

References:

Schellenberg EG. (2004) Music lessons enhance IQ. Psychological Science 15(8):511-514.
Hyde KL, Lerch J, Norton A, Forgeard M, Winner E, Evans AC, Schlaug G. (2009) Musical training shapes structural brain development. Journal of Neuroscience 29(10):3019-3025.

Musical training protects auditory processing speed

2012-02-02T13:36:00.000-08:00

Neurons in the auditory pathway have the fastest temporal responses of any sensory neurons. And this makes sense: visual, tactile, taste and smell stimuli don’t change as quickly as sounds do, so the neurons supporting those senses don’t have to be as fine-tuned in time as those that support hearing.

It has been known for a while that the auditory pathway in older brains doesn’t work as quickly as in younger brains, so that, quite apart from actual hearing loss, older people have a harder time understanding speech because they just can’t listen fast enough to be able to properly register to such high-speed auditory input.

But now a new study has shown that musical training can reduce or eliminate this decrease in neuronal processing speed in the auditory pathway. The study, conducted in the lab of Nina Kraus at Northwestern University compared brainstem auditory responses to the sound “da” in four groups of people: younger and older non-musicians, and younger and older musicians. What they found was revealing: older non-musicians had much slower responses to the transition between the consonant and the vowel in the sound “da”, compared to younger non-musicians. In contrast, the auditory responses of older musicians were very similar to those of younger musicians.

(Figure from Parbery-Clark, 2012. Panel A shows the temporal characteristics of the sound “da”, while Panels B and C show the subjects’ brainstem responses to the sound, as measured by EEG)

Musical training therefore acts in a protective fashion to maintain the auditory processing speed of older adults, which undoubtedly helps them to be able to understand speech. The question now is whether musical training starting later in life can help elderly people regain auditory skills that they have lost.

Reference:

Parbery-Clark A, Anderson S, Hittner E, Kraus N. (2012) Musical experience offsets age-related delays in neural timing. Neurobiology of Aging in press, doi: 10.1016/j.neurobiolaging.2011.12.015

Sixth Sense

2012-01-26T11:59:00.000-08:00

I’m watching a friend play a Chopin Waltz. Her eyes are kept trained on the music in front of her, but her left hand is jumping back and forth between the bass notes and the upper notes of each chord. Her pinkie strikes a low C# and then her hand moves right off the keyboard and, unguided by her eyes, flies up to play a C# minor triad over an octave higher. Then, in a split second, she leaps her hand down to a low D, again without looking. How do her fingers land unerringly on the correct notes each time? To the untrained, this seems like magic, or maybe a sixth sense.

How many senses?

Ask any school child how many senses we have, and you’ll get the answer: five. Sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. We’re all taught this, but the answer is correct only up to a certain point. The reality is that we have five senses that tell us about the outside world, but a number of other senses that tell us about our own body. The two main internal senses are balance, which tells us about the orientation of our head and body with respect to gravity, and proprioception, which tells us about the positions of our various body parts.

(Photo credit: aarrgh via Flickr)

If you’re not convinced that you have a sense called proprioception, try this little demonstration: Close your eyes. Now wave your right arm all over the place. Then touch your nose with your right forefinger. You didn’t have any trouble finding your nose did you? Even without looking, your brain knew exactly where in space your finger was, and exactly where your nose was. It accomplishes this by receiving information from special receptors in your muscles and joints, which tell the brain how much stretch there is on each muscle, how much load there is on the muscle, and what angle the joints are bent at. From this information, the brain assembles a spatial map of your body so that it knows how to move in order to accomplish a particular movement goal, like touching your nose.

Conscious and unconscious proprioception

Proprioception information from the muscles and joints travels up the spinal cord to two separate places in the brain. One set of information goes to the somatosensory cortex (which also receives information about touch), and this provides us with conscious awareness of where our body is in space. An identical set of information travels to the cerebellum, where it is used unconsciously to provide feedback about our movements, and to aid in motor learning.

We don’t think much about our sense of proprioception, but we are using it all the time. This is especially true of instrumental musicians. Consider the left hand of my friend, jumping back and forth between the bass note and upper notes of each chord. An inexperienced (or unpracticed) pianist would need to watch her left hand to make sure she hits the correct notes, but with practice the hand “knows” exactly how far to move to land on the right keys. This is proprioception in action. String players similarly have to know exactly how far to move each finger to play the next note. They don’t have to watch their fingers. The fingers themselves are sending signals to the brain as to their positions, so we know where our fingers are without watching. (String players, of course, also use auditory feedback to know where their fingers are, since the position of the finger on the string fine-tunes the pitch of the note)

Practice makes perfect

Like anything else the brain does, proprioception can be improved with practice. This can start away from the instruments, by having students move particular fingers without looking. In my beginner MYC classes we always spend time singing finger number songs like “Where is finger one?” and having the children stick up the correct finger as we sing. After the children know which finger is which, we can try this exercise with eyes closed. It’s trickier but very useful.

It’s common for young students to use vision instead of proprioception to guide their playing. A little girl in one of my classes last week had exactly this problem, and had to pause and look down at the keys periodically while performing for me. Then, as she returned her eyes to the page in front of her, she had to pause again to find her place. I recommended that her mother hold a piece of cardboard over her hands as she practices to force her to use proprioception instead of watching her hands.

Forcing ourselves to play without looking is an excellent way to improve proprioception. Once technical exercises are mastered, I recommend that an additional week be spent practicing them with eyes closed. This can be quite challenging for chords and arpeggios but will pay dividends in the future.

My experience is with piano, but each instrument has its own proprioceptive demands. For example, I also play the flute, and it’s pretty much impossible to watch your fingers while you’re playing the flute. Flutists, therefore, are required to rely on proprioception from the very beginning of their training. I’d love to hear suggestions for improving proprioception on any instrument.

“Fast” and “Slow” Learning

2012-01-19T11:55:00.000-08:00

Every once in a while, I take a step back from working with my students and notice just how far they have come since they started studying piano. That adorable five-year-old learning to harmonize her scales was (just yesterday, it seems) a chubby three-year-old who struggled to coordinate her fingers to play three different notes in a row. The focused eight-year-old determined to get the hang of using the sustain pedal used to be an overly-bouncy five-year-old who had a difficult time playing with two hands. Part of their progress is developmental, of course, but mostly it is due to their daily practice and commitment to learning music.

Fast vs. slow learning

When we practice a musical instrument (or other motor skill) over a long period of time, there are actually two types of motor learning going on. The first is “fast” learning, which happens on a timescale of minutes to days, and is characterized by automatization of specific motor tasks. This is the learning that we see when a student gets better at playing a particular piece of music. It is likely due to changes in synaptic strength in particular brain regions. Scientists see a decrease in brain activity as fast learning occurs.

In contrast “slow” learning occurs over weeks to years and is seen as gradual improvements in performance. This is the learning that we see over the long-term, when students get better at playing overall, so they’re able to master more difficult repertoire. It depends on reorganization of areas in the brain, and the recruitment of additional brain regions for certain tasks.

We can illustrate the difference between these two types of learning by comparing a beginner musician with an experienced musician. Imagine the two musicians are given the same piece of music to learn, a piece of intermediate difficulty. For the beginner, the piece would be extremely hard to play, because she would not have the basic motor skills needed to perform it. For the advanced musician, the piece would be less difficult, because she would already have learned “how” to play. The difference between the two musicians is in the amount of slow learning that they have done. The experienced musician has motor patterns laid down in her brain that allow her to more-or-less effortlessly convert the written music to movements which cause the correct sounds to be produced.

If both musicians practiced this piece, they would both get better at playing it, through repetition of the specific movements required to play the piece. This is fast learning.

Brain changes in fast and slow learning

Studies have shown that fast and slow learning involve changes in different parts of the brain. Susan Landau and Mark D’Esposito at UC Berkeley performed a fascinating study that was published in 2006. They compared the brains of pianists and non-pianists performing a finger-movement task while undergoing fMRI scans, to see what parts of the brain were being used. This study looked at slow learning that had already happened in the brains of the pianists, by seeing how their brains were different from non-pianists. And it also looked at fast learning, by seeing how the brain of each individual changed as the participants improved at the task.

What they found was that the pianists used several areas of the brain that were not used by non-pianists, most notably the caudate nucleus (part of the basal ganglia, thought to be involved in motor planning) and parts of the parietal lobe, which is known to be involved in integration of sensory information, and has been previously shown to be activated during music playing. During their years of musical training, the pianists have recruited these extra regions of the brain to be used during finger movements.

For fast learning, the study showed that brain activity decreased as participants learned the task. This was particularly true for activity in the premotor and supplementary motor cortex. What this means is that our brains have to work hard at a new task. We can feel this, because new tasks seem effortful. As we repeat new tasks, the areas of our brain responsible for planning and organizing our movements don’t have to work as hard – some of their burden has been shifted to automatic memory processes.

Memory representations

If we learn new but similar tasks over a period of weeks to years, we learn to use different strategies, involving different parts of our brain. A lot of this involves “chunking” – grouping thoughts or movements into chunks. For example, instead of playing a C and an E and a G, we just play a C triad. Our brain thinks of it as one entity instead of three separate notes, and this representation is much more efficient. There’s also a motor representation of this: when I think of a C triad, I can imagine playing it and it’s a one-step hand movement. My brain has a motor pattern already set up to play a C triad, and this uses a lot less brain power than reading each note separately and converting it into movements of each finger.

Teachers guide slow learning

Students (especially children) tend to focus on fast learning: they just want to get better at playing each particular song. They realize that their playing is improving generally, but they are not thinking about what path their slow learning should take. This is what I, as a teacher, need to be aware of: where is their slow learning taking them? The teacher’s role is to guide the student's overall motor development. A given student might need to practice playing in a particular key, or using four-note chords, or playing lots of octaves, so that these hand positions and characteristic movements will become part of their repertoire of motor patterns.

My students are gradually learning motor strategies and memory representations for musical paradigms, and this slow learning is what is turning them into better pianists.

Earworms: What Makes a Tune Sticky?

2012-01-12T12:12:00.000-08:00

(ear photo by jemsweb, worm photo by daz smith; from Flickr Creative Commons)

Last weekend I had the pleasure of attending a reading of an amazing new musical, One plus One, written by my friends Gil and Sarah Jaysmith. The music from this show has been bouncing around in my head ever since. You’ve certainly had this experience: a fragment of a tune “stuck in your head”, looping over and over. It seems the only possible way to shake this experience is to replace the tune with another, and even that’s only successful some of the time. We call these tunes “earworms” and music that tends to get caught as earworms is known as “sticky”.

But are there really characteristics of music that make it more or less sticky, more or less likely to be an earworm? There is not a lot of research yet about earworms, but it’s starting to crop up in journals about the psychology of music, so I had a quick look to see what’s known.

To start with, scientists tend to call this phenomenon “Involuntary Musical Imagery”, INMI for short. It’s kind of hard to study something that can only be based on people’s verbal reports of its existence, so the studies that are out there all use the technique of simply asking people about their earworm experience. And the studies have shown something you may have guessed: earworms are very common. Over 90% of people reported that they experience earworms at least once a week. About 60% have them at least once a day, and 26% of people have them more than once a day (these numbers are from Liikkanen, 2008).

Recent vs. Sticky

Another interesting study from Finland looked at whether there was a recency effect in earworms. The recency effect is a well-known memory characteristic, in which we’re more likely to remember the last item in a list, rather than an item in the middle, because we’ve seen it more recently and also, no other items have been introduced to interfere with the memory. In this 2009 study, Liikkanen proposed that tunes that we’ve heard most recently are most likely to be stuck in our head. This makes sense to me based on my own experiences: I’ve often had an old pop song stuck in my head and wondered, “Where did that come from?”, but when I thought a little, I remembered that that song had been playing in the grocery store I had visited 10 minutes earlier. I hadn’t even really noticed the song when it was playing, but just hearing it caused it to be stuck in my head almost right away.

Liikkanen performed an internet study using thousands of Finnish internet users, and he triggered earworms by having the particpants complete lyrics to a number of songs. The order in which the songs were presented was varied, so that Liikkanen could test whether the song presented last was more likely to trigger an earworm. After completing the lyrics, the participants did a “filler” exercise for four minutes, and then they were asked if they had experienced any earworms. About 50% had, and the results showed two things. First of all, some songs were just more “sticky” than others, no matter what order they were presented in. But also, the song presented last was more likely to get stuck in the participants’ heads. So yes, there’s a recency effect. But the characteristics of the songs themselves also have an effect on whether they’re likely to get stuck in your head.

On the other hand, a diary study by Beaman and Williams (2010), in which 12 people reported in detail on over 250 earworm episodes, found that only 10 different tunes were experienced as earworms by more than one person. You’d think that if certain tunes were intrinsically very sticky, then these tunes would get stuck in everyone’s head, especially if they were current pop hits or TV themes, or current advertising jingles.

Circumstances

The most recent paper on the topic of earworms, by Williamson and colleagues, looked at the circumstances under which they occur, and amassed a large pool of earworm data from internet users. The researchers were trying to answer the question: “Under what circumstances do earworms occur?”, and their results were interesting. The most common circumstance in which a song got stuck in someone’s head was when it had been heard recently, or heard repeatedly. This jibes with Liikkanen’s 2009 study.

Another common circumstance that triggered an earworm was through association – for example, seeing a picture of Elvis might trigger Blue Suede Shoes, or remembering a high school dance might start Stairway to Heaven playing in your head. Obviously these associations are highly individual. Mood plays a factor too, since certain moods like sadness or stress can trigger certain melodies for some people. In fact, just thinking of whether sadness triggers any melodies for me brought into my head the song I’m so lonesome I could cry, as performed by Holly Cole.

Another experience that was identified as leading to earworms was boredom, when the mind starts to wander. And this I find particularly interesting because I think this is a clue to what parts of the brain might be involved in generating earworms.

The Default-Mode Network

In general music imagery activates the same parts of the brain that are activated when we listen to music. If you imagine hearing a song, it actually activates the auditory cortex just as if you were hearing it. However, involuntary music imagery is probably slightly different, because it tends to occur when we’re not actively thinking about the music. There’s actually a brain network that’s activated when we’re not consciously thinking about anything: the default-mode network, which consists of the medial prefrontal cortex, precuneus, posterior cingulate cortex, inferior parietal cortex, and lateral temporal cortex.

Figure from Buckner et al., 2008

Activity in the neurons in this network goes down when we’re thinking about something, and increases when we’re doing nothing. Activity in the default-mode network is believed to be the neural correlate of mind-wandering. There hasn’t been any research on this yet, but I’d be willing to bet money that your default mode network is active when you’ve got an earworm.

Characteristics of Sticky Songs?

The research on earworms certainly is a start, but I was surprised that I couldn’t find any research that looked at musical characteristics of songs to try to determine what would make a song “sticky” or not. There is a lot of speculation about it, but nothing even close to conclusive.

Here’s my own take on earworms: I have music stuck in my head pretty much all the time, except for when there’s music actually playing, or if I’m busy teaching, talking, or thinking about something. In other words, if my mental effort is directed somewhere, no earworms, at least not that I’m aware of. If I’m doing something that doesn’t require my conscious thoughts, then there’s an internal soundtrack, usually a repeated fragment of a song. What this means is that the earworms are generated when my default mode network is active: when I’m cooking meals or washing dishes, during my 30 minute bike ride to pick up the kids from school, when I’m waiting for a bus, when I’m lying in bed trying to get to sleep.

The default mode network seems to be responsible for working through background thoughts, making connections, making sense of stuff that’s happened recently. And what’s happened to me recently? Well, lots of music. The music that gets stuck in my head the most is music that I’m trying to learn, or trying to make sense of: songs from a new musical I’ve heard, for example. In the last few days, when my earworms haven’t been Jaysmith earworms, my mind’s ear has been working away at the “Mah na Mah na” song from the Muppets. I’ve been teaching this song to my students with the ambitious plan that they will sing it as a combined group at their upcoming piano recital. I still haven’t quite figured out the best way to teach them the rhythms, which are a little complicated, and I also haven’t figured out who will sing which bits, and whether the verses will be improvised scat or sung as written. I’ve also been practicing the piano accompaniment. With all this focus on the song, it’s not at all surprising that it’s the one stuck in my head: I’ve heard it lots recently, and also my conscious mind has several problems to solve with respect to it.

The research on earworms is admittedly pretty limited so far, but a lot of it points to the idea that earworms are all about memory: the tunes that turn into earworms for us are those that are important, heard recently, heard repeatedly, or are triggered by an association with something else. None of this has much to do with the characteristics of the music itself, but anecdotally we certainly find that some music is “stickier” than others. I think this is simply because some music is more memorable than others. Sticky music is tuneful, entertaining, accessible without being predictable, and contains repetition of the themes to help you remember it. The Jaysmith’s music easily has these characteristics, and it’s not surprising that it has a strong tendency for earworm formation.

Memorable music gets remembered, and our default-mode network has us thinking about it when we’re not doing other things. The really interesting question about earworms is why we can’t stop them. Some people have related them to obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), in which people have thoughts that they are unable to stop. But no one has shown a relationship between OCD and earworms, so it’s completely unclear whether there is any neurological similarity. Why can’t we stop these bits of tunes from bouncing around in our heads? No one knows. I guess the researchers still have some work to do.

References:

Beaman CP, Williams TI. Earworms (stuck song syndrome): Towards a natural history of intrusive thoughts. British Journal of Psychology. 2010;101(4):637-653.
Liikkanen LA. How the mind is easily hooked on musical imagery. Proceedings of the 7th Triennial Conference of European Socity for the Cognitive Sciences of Music. 2009.
Liikkanen LA. Music in Everymind: Commonality of Involuntary Musical Imagery. Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition. 2008
Schürmann M, Raij T, Fujiki N, Hari R. Mind’s Ear in a Musician: Where and When in the Brain. NeuroImage. 2002;16(2):434-440.
Williamson VJ, Jilka SR, Fry J, et al. How do “earworms” start? Classifying the everyday circumstances of Involuntary Musical Imagery. Psychology of Music. 2011. Available at: http://pom.sagepub.com/cgi/doi/10.1177/0305735611418553. Accessed January 12, 2012.

This is my Brain on Books about the Brain

2012-01-04T13:51:00.000-08:00

Ahhhh… The kids are back at school and I finally have a little time to myself. As I take a few days to catch up, I thought I’d give you an informal post about what neuroscience and music books I’ve been reading lately (and what I think about them), what I’m reading right now, and also what I plan to read soon.

I should preface my reviews of these books by saying that I generally have little patience for books written about music and the brain. This sounds like I’m being snotty, but it’s just a topic that I already know a lot about, so I have to sift through a lot of information to find something that catches my interest. Daniel Levitin’s bestseller This is Your Brain on Music was particularly mind-numbing for me (although I do recommend it), because it assumes the reader knows nothing about music and nothing about the brain. It’s a good book, but I am certainly not the intended audience.

Anyway, I’ve recently finished two books “for the layman” about music and science: Healing at the Speed of Sound, by Don Campbell and Alex Doman, and The Power of Music by Elena Mannes. Although the two books cover very similar topics, they are very different.

When I read an interview with the Don Campbell on Salon.com, I immediately requested Healing at the Speed of Sound from the library. The book purports to discuss how pervasive music has become in our society, especially through the use of ipods, and the effect that this is having on our brains. Sounds interesting, no? Unfortunately, the book did not live up to its potential.

I was a more than a little disappointed by the fluffiness of this book. In part, it tries to be a self-help book, starting out with recommendations for music to start the day with. Depending on how easy it is for you to wake up, the book recommends nature sounds, classical music, or rock ‘n’ roll. And it goes on from there, discussing the whole soundtrack of your day. Music to listen to in the car on the way to work, music to listen to at work. Listen to Bach to increase your creativity, listen to driving rock while you work out to keep you energized. You get the idea, I’m sure. I was unimpressed. I can find my own playlists, thank you.

Later chapters read like an infomercial for the benefits of music. This is not a story or a serious discussion, it’s more like a list of all the great things music can do for you. Music is amazing! Music can heal! Music can make you smart! There is very little detail about the research. Although some of the claims the book makes are intriguing, I found that most of the references are newspaper or on-line new articles rather than original research or conversations with scientists, leaving me unsure what to believe. Many of the topics are ones I am familiar with, so I have an idea of what research has been done, but the book didn’t offer me any of the caveats of the research, or tell me that some of the conclusions are only tentative. And the repeated warnings throughout the book to turn down our music so as not to harm our ears left me feeling like this book was written by someone’s grandpa. As my kids would say, “I know, that; I’m not a dumb-head!”

In contrast to Campbell, Elena Mannes describes specific experiments and has interviewed a number of scientists and musicians, mostly as preparation for her documentary The Music Instinct: Science and Song, upon which the book is based. This lends credibility to her writing; her fluid story-telling prose helps too. She loses some of that credibility (to my mind) in the chapter “Music of the Spheres”, where she compares music to the vibrations of the stars and planets. I was also bored by the discussions of whether birdsong and whalesong should be considered music – it’s a little too “if a tree falls in a forest…” for my liking. Still, her explanations of the role and potential roles of music in healing are much more scientifically based than Campbell’s, and though she discusses therapies that are outside of the mainstream, such as psychoacoustic therapy, and brain-wave entrainment, she at least admits that the scientific support for these areas is weak, and the jury is still out on their usefulness. Overall, this book is worth reading, although I suspect watching the documentary would be a lot more entertaining.

On my bookshelf right now is Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. It’s not music-related, and I’ll admit that I’m not very far into the book yet. But so far, it’s a fascinating account of how we use two very different systems for thinking – one automatic, quick and often highly biased, and a second one that is effortful, slow, calculating, and also very lazy. Kahneman, a renowned psychologist and Nobel laureate who has written a number of books, has a style that is dense but gripping. The book is full of quick self-tests to demonstrate the fallibility of our reasoning systems, followed by engaging explanations.

And here are my future reading plans:

I’m itching to read Michael Gazzaniga’s Who’s in Charge? Free will and the Science of the Brain, as soon as it actually gets onto the Vancouver Public Library bookshelves; it’s still listed as “on order”. It’s based on an idea that I’ve been interested in for some time: our actions are all controlled by our brains, which are collections of cells, governed by the same deterministic and probabilistic rules as the rest of biology. So when we choose to do something, isn’t it really just our neurons responding to the action potentials of other neurons, which are triggered somewhere upstream by external stimuli? Where does free will come into this? Does it actually exist or is it a figment of our lively imaginations? My interest in this topic was stimulated by another book, The Mind and the Brain by Jeffrey Schwartz, who brings quantum mechanics into the mix. I’m not sure what I believe about all this, but I definitely want to read more.

Also on my library hold list is Music Cognition: A Science of Listening by Henjan Honing, a professor of music cognition at the University of Amsterdam. The book sounds promising, even though it is written for a general audience. I’ll keep you posted.

A Grain of Salt

2011-12-20T08:47:00.000-08:00

Studying music makes you smarter, right? If you believe every research study that’s ever been done, music training increases your IQ, makes you better at math, enhances verbal memory, general verbal ability and non-verbal reasoning, improves fine-motor control and motor learning, increases vocabulary and reading ability, enhances visuospatial cognition, and improves executive function.

Musicians, especially classically trained musicians, are generally thought to be smart. And music and math “go together” so that people who are good at one are good at the other. These ideas are so frequently touted that many people just assume they are true, without really looking at the evidence.

There have a been a fair number of research studies looking at the question of how musical training affects other abilities. What I’d like to make clear today is that not all studies are created equal.

How would you study it?

Imagine you want to test the hypothesis that studying music increases your IQ. There are two main types of study that you could use. The first (and weaker) type of study is correlational. Usually the study works something like this: you would recruit a group of people with musical training (often university students studying music), and a second control group of people with no musical training. Both groups take an intelligence test. You expect that the group with musical training would be found to be smarter, and if they are, the conclusion would be that musical training increases your IQ.

Correlation and causation

But have you really shown that? Correlational studies like this should have an important disclaimer: the study doesn’t actually prove that musical training makes you smarter. Scientists like to say that “correlation does not imply causation”. What this means is that a correlational study shows only that: a correlation. The study shows that there is some kind of relationship between musical training and increased intelligence, but it doesn’t show what that relationship is. There are several possibilities:

1) Musical training makes you smarter

2) People who are smarter are more likely to take and continue with musical studies

3) Both musical training and increased intelligence are caused by some third unknown variable (such as family income, or competitive personality, or strong parental support).

Do you see how correlational studies are kind of weak? There are a lot of studies in the literature that are conducted this way, because it’s easy to do. But the studies don’t necessarily tell us all that much.

Longitudinal studies

So what is the better way to do this study? The second type of research study you could do is a longitudinal study. This type of study takes two groups of people and follows them over time to see how musical training alters other skills. You would recruit people for the study and divide them into two groups. One group would receive music instruction and one group would not. You give the subjects an IQ test at the beginning and end of the music instruction, which goes for a defined period of time. Ideally there would be no difference in test scores between the two groups at the beginning of the study, but at the end of the study, the group with musical training would outperform the control group. The conclusion would be that the musical training has caused the difference in performance on the test, and this would be a much stronger and believable conclusion.

Dividing up the groups

There are a number of issues to consider in this type of study. The first is: how are the participants divided into the two groups? There are different ways of doing this. One way is to divide them completely randomly, which might seem like it would be the best, but what if you accidentally ended up with all the smartest people in one group? Then you would find a difference in IQ before you even started the experiment, and that would make your study kind of useless. If you have a large number of participants in your study, you're probably okay with a random division into groups, because chances are it will work out okay, but if you have a small number of people, you need to be careful about this.

Another option is completely non-random: you recruit a group of people who were about to start receiving musical training anyway, and then you recruit a group of control people who match them first group in IQ. This option has the advantage that you don’t have to give the musical training; the subjects were already going to do that. Of course, the disadvantage here is that by taking away the randomness, you may be preselecting people in your musical training group that have some other variable you can’t control for. For example, maybe the people in the musical training group have a higher income, which is why they can afford music lessons, and this may affect the way intelligence develops over the course of the study.

The third option is called pseudo-random. You recruit people, give them the initial intelligence test, and then divide them into two groups in such a way that the two groups are evenly matched for initial intelligence, and also matched for other variables like age, family income, etc.

Drop-outs

No matter how you split up your groups, there are other problems to be overcome with this type of study. The main one is a kind of trade-off. You want the study to run for as long as possible to ensure the biggest difference between the two groups. If you only give one week of musical training, you’re less likely to find an effect on IQ. But if the study runs for too long, you run into other difficulties. First of all, it’s expensive because you have to provide music lessons for all that time. And second, you start running into problems where people drop out of the study, usually from the group receiving music instruction. People do drop out of music lessons; it’s a big investment in time and not everybody is willing to make the commitment to daily practice, once they see how much work is involved. So you have fewer people in your music-training group. You might think this is not a big deal, but there’s another issue here. If people who are less inclined to study music drop out, then you are left with people who naturally more inclined to study music. Maybe these people are more intelligent to start with. Or there is some other factor (like level of parental support) that could contribute to both continuing with musical training and also increased intelligence. You see? If too many people drop out, you lose your randomness.

The Bottom Line

I hope this discussion gives you some perspective on studies about the effects of musical training. It’s actually hard to design and implement a really good study. But then, what effect does musical training really have? What can we believe from all the research that is out there?

I’ll discuss this research more in future posts, but it seems to me that there is pretty clear evidence that musical training improves verbal abilities, probably because music and speech both involve auditory parts of the brain. And improved verbal abilities enhance reading skills. A recent study also showed that musical training improved executive function in children. I haven’t seen any good evidence that musical training improves math or spatial skills. As for overall IQ, some studies have shown that musical training increases IQ, but some have not seen this increase, so I conclude that the effect is probably quite small.

Does studying music make you smarter? Maybe a little.

A Lot More Than 10 Percent!

2011-12-14T11:52:00.000-08:00

Have you ever heard that you only use 10% of your brain? I don’t know where that idea came from, but it’s definitely wrong. At any one time, you are using many, many parts of your brain at once, certainly more than 10%. Even doing nothing activates circuits in brain known as the default mode network, which is most active when we are daydreaming, lost in space. Only 10% of our brain? That idea is completely bogus, as are a number of other things you think you know about the brain.

Listening to and playing music probably uses more of the brain at once than most other activities we engage in. Research has shown that listening to music recruits a number of different areas of the brain. However, it’s been tricky to tease apart which parts of the brain do exactly what in processing music, since it’s almost impossible to completely separate the different components that make up music. And besides, if you try to whittle music down to a single component (i.e. rhythm or pitch or timbre), is what you’re left with really music? Does the brain respond the same way to stylized lab-produced sounds as it would to a real musical excerpt?

A recent study from a Finnish research group has tried to answer these questions by combining computer-based acoustic feature extraction with fMRI analysis of people listening to a tango by Astor Piazzolla.

The results support much of the research that has been reported in the past, in terms of which parts of the brain are activated by specific aspects of music – timbre, rhythmic pulse, key, etc. But the findings also show that the areas activated are more widespread than previously thought, and there are also areas that are activated during music listening that didn’t seem to correlate with any of the features specifically studied. What these parts of the brain are doing remains to be seen. Also, and not surprisingly, listening to a real piece of music activated emotional centres of the brain more than in other studies using less naturalistic stimuli.

Timbre was found to activate widespread areas of temporal cortex, especially on the right side, as well as cognitive parts of cerebellum. Music with complex timbre deactivates the default mode network, meaning that it grabs our attention and the parts of our brain that make our mind wander get turned off.

Interestingly, motor and somatosensory areas of brain were activated, even when just listening to music. The subjects were all trained musicians, and it has previously been shown that listening to music can activate motor areas, as if we are unconsciously thinking about actually playing the music we hear. The somatosensory areas may be activated due to mirror neuron activity. These areas are activated when hearing sounds made by others’ actions.

Overall, it is clear from this study and from previous research that listening to music activates large brain-wide networks of neurons. Performing music must activate even more of our brain: areas for planning and controlling movements, somatosensory areas for bodily feedback, and visual cortex for reading music, at the very least. No wonder musical training is so good for your brain: it’s a like full-brain workout.

Opening Night Jitters

2011-12-07T13:45:00.000-08:00

Tonight is opening night. I can already imagine it: the theatre is full. From the wings I can hear muted pre-show conversations, the rustle of programs, laughter. The house lights go down, and the tension in my stomach tightens; my intestines feel like knots. I start to sweat, and hope my shaking is not visible. As the opening music begins, I walk onto the stage.

The Cast of Another Elfing Musical. Photo by Jon Snow

I’m appearing this week in an amateur musical theatre production. Six sold-out shows in a small theatre. I get to sing, dance, act and play the flute. And though my body shows its instinctive stage-fright responses, I know I will be fine. I’ve been through this before.

Performance Anxiety

Stagefright, known to scientists and doctors as “performance anxiety” results from an overactivation of a part of the brain called the amygdala. This walnut-sized collection of nuclei located deep in the temporal lobe of the brain is responsible for emotion, and the emotion is does best is fear. Fear, after all, is what stagefright is all about. We’re afraid we’re going to play wrong notes, be out of tune, forget what to play altogether, and most of all we’re afraid of looking like a fool. Afraid of being judged and coming up lacking.

Role of the Amygdala

The amygdala is closely connected to the hypothalamus, the part of the brain that controls the autonomic nervous system, itself responsible for keeping our bodily systems on an even keel. When we experience fear, the amygdala tells the hypothalamus to activate the sympathetic nervous system, leading to the well-known “fight or flight response”. Our heart-rate increases, breathing becomes rapid and shallow, we perspire. Blood is directed away from our extremities, gut and skin, and towards the large muscles of our arms and legs, so we’re ready to run or fight if necessary. The adrenal glands release adrenaline and cortisol into the bloodstream, which act to mobilize glucose into the blood so we have an easily accessible source of energy.

The fight or flight response may be useful if our fear is the result of an encounter with a grizzly bear, but in the case of stagefright, it’s hard to see how it can help us. Altered breathing just makes more problems for singers and wind instrumentalists. Lack of blood to the fingers hampers skilled movements of pianists, violinists and other musicians. And shaking doesn’t help anybody perform. From this point of view, fear is a maladaptive response to performance.

Fear alters your brain chemistry

However, fear has an effect not just on our body, but on our brain too. As well as activating the sympathetic nervous system, fear increases the levels of noradrenaline and glucocorticoids in the brain. These chemicals can have both positive and negative effects. Many musicians feel that a little bit of “performance jitters” gives them a heightened awareness, an extra edge that helps them perform better. Studies have shown that the combination of noradrenaline and corticosterone improves memory and attention. Moderate levels of stress have been shown to lead to extra vigilance and alertness, and increased cognitive processing speed.

Fear and stress can certainly have negative effects on our brain, too. Many of these maladaptive fear responses are mediated by the prefrontal cortex. Fear inhibits our working memory and decreases our behavioural flexibility. We’ve probably all experienced that feeling of panic when fear makes us completely forget everything we’re supposed to be doing.

Panicking and Choking

When I mentioned to a friend that I was planning to post about stagefright, she handed me a book off of her shelf. It was What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell, and she recommended a particular chapter that talks about the difference between panicking and choking. These are two different responses cause people to fail in stressful situations.

When people choke, they start to think too much. For musicians and athletes, this is a recipe for disaster. As I discussed in a previous post, much of what we learn during our music practice goes into implicit memory, meaning we’re not consciously aware of the sequence of movements we’re making. But sometimes under stressful conditions, we over-think, and start trying to use our explicit memory of how to play, which isn’t very good. Our performance falls apart; we choke.

Panicking, on the other hand, is when the mind goes blank. Instead of thinking too much, we are unable to think enough. Obviously, this can also be a huge problem during music performance. If my mind goes blank tonight right at the beginning of my solo, I’m in big trouble.

Combating Stagefright

Stagefright falls into the anxiety family of mental disorders. For many, it can’t really be called a disorder – a few butterflies in the stomach before performing is normal. But for some, stagefright is a serious problem, impairing their musical performance and perhaps discouraging them from becoming serious musicians. Several studies have looked at the prevalence of stagefright and found that it is a widespread problem, but not much discussed. Many professional musicians are prescribed beta-blockers, which act to block the effects of adrenaline. Others option include the of use yoga, meditation, deep breathing exercises, or mental imagery to counteract stagefright.

The studies that I read about the prevalence of stagefright all basically boiled down to the same thing: it would be good for teachers to talk to their students about stagefright and ways to combat it. When I was a teenager, I had an excellent flute teacher who taught me some simple meditation exercises as a way to relax before performing. My students have a recital coming up at the end of January, so I’ll be thinking about what I can do to help them mentally prepare (and you’ll likely see another post on this topic around that time).

As a performer, I find that what helps me the most is, quite simply, being prepared. If I feel that I know my music inside out and upside down, I’m less likely to stress about performing. And on that note, I think I’ll go do a little practicing for tonight’s show. And this evening at the start of the show, I’ll close my eyes, take a deep breath, and just go do it.

Choice as a motivator

2011-11-29T11:31:00.000-08:00

Practice, memory, intelligence, talent… we can discuss these as much as we want, but I think that the most important element of musical training is motivation. People who are motivated to play music will practice regularly and get better at playing. If you’re good at playing, you’re going to want to do it more, which results in more practice. It’s a positive feedback loop. On the other hand, if you’re not motivated to play music, you won’t practice very much, and you won’t be good at it. This will not make you want to play more, and sets up a negative feedback loop.

External rewards

Practicing music is hard work for everyone, and we could all use external motivators from time to time. This is especially true for children. Getting “good” at playing music is a long-term reward and children do not have the self-discipline required for that kind of delayed gratification. So parents and music teachers offer incentives and rewards for practice: a sticker for a certain number of days or minutes of practice, a trip to a concert for a certain number of weeks of good practice. In my house, your daily piano practice will earn you 15 minutes of coveted computer play-time.

But it’s interesting and useful to consider what leads to motivation and why.

Reward centres in the brain

Rewards lead to activation in certain regions of the brain: there are reward centres in the midbrain, nucleus accumbens, caudate nucleus, and orbitofrontal cortex. These areas are activated by pleasurable stimuli: good food, money, sex, rewarding exercise, and listening to music we enjoy, among many others. These types of pleasures lead to the release of endorphins and other endogenous opiates, which activate the reward circuitry of the brain. These natural brain chemicals are related to drugs such as morphine, which explains why narcotic drugs also activate the pleasure centres of the brain.

Choice is a reward

A recent study published in the journal Psychological Science (Leotti & Delgado, 2011) reports that the ability to choose is a reward in itself. The anticipation of getting to choose something activates parts of the brain that are involved in the reward and motivation pathway. This study used a simple key-press experiment in which the participants sometimes got to choose which key to press, and sometimes were told by the computer which key to press. Pressing the key led to a random monetary reward, with the “choice” key-presses and “no-choice” key-presses leading to the same overall reward. However, the participants felt as if they were more rewarded when they got to choose which key to press. The researchers looked at which areas of the brain were activated during the key-presses and found that areas of the brain associated with reward were more activated when the participants got to choose which key to press.

The implication is that people see activities where they get to choose something as inherently more valuable than activities where they do not get to choose. We all like to feel we have control over our lives, as much as possible, and having that control activates the pleasure centres of our brain.

Choice increases the perceived value of whatever is chosen

Having a choice is motivating, but here’s a second point about choice that’s worth noticing: when we choose between two things that are similar, we are more likely to think that what we chose is even better than we first thought. This was first shown in the 1950’s by a researcher who asked housewives to rate kitchen appliances, and then choose between a pair of them. When later asked to rate the appliances again, the housewives had increased their preference for the appliance they selected, and decreased their rating for the appliance they didn't select.

This “choice-induced re-evaluation” has been shown repeatedly in different studies. In 2009, Sharot et al. showed that after people had chosen something (in this study it was a hypothetical choice of vacation destination), there was an increase in activity in the caudate nucleus, an area of the brain implicated in motivation and reward. This meant that after choosing something, they derived even more pleasure from it.

How can we apply the power of choice in musical training? Motivation is a critical element of musical training. Any way we can increase motivation, we should take advantage of it!

Use the power of choice

As teachers and parents, we can take advantage of the power of choice to increase students’ motivation. Parents can give students the option of when to practice, and in what order. Teachers can let students choose from a list of two or three pieces when selecting repertoire. This opportunity to choose is a reward in itself and also will make the students like the chosen piece more. As we have seen, it will be natural for them to re-evaluate the piece as more pleasurable once they have chosen it. If students start out liking the piece more, they will practice it more. The more they practice, the better they get at playing it, and this makes them like it more, setting up the positive feedback loop that we’re looking for.

After musing and reading about choice as a motivator this week, I realized that this is actually a fairly common tool in a parent’s arsenal. Right now my 6-year-old is going through a phase of aggressive rebellion (at least, let’s hope it’s a phase). Recently, I convinced him to get into the bath but when the time came to wash his hair, he absolutely refused. “I got wet all over and that’s good enough”, he insisted. Instead of fighting, I played the “choice” card: “Would you like Mummy’s shampoo, or Daddy’s, or here’s a new kind that’s passionfruit flavour. Mmmm, it smells good”. It worked like a charm to defuse the power struggle. He was happy because he got to choose, and he liked the fruity shampoo even more once he had chosen it.

This week, I'll offer him a choice in his piano repertoire and I’m willing to bet he’ll like to play whichever piece he chooses. I can almost see his caudate nucleus lighting up.

Mixing It Up (Part 2)

2011-11-22T13:13:00.000-08:00

Imagine 41 beginner clarinet students, about 11 years old. Their task: learning three new short melodies over three days. Half of the kids practice one melody every day, turning to a new melody the next day (“blocked practice”). The other half of the kids practice all three melodies every day, in a random fashion. The researcher records their practice sessions, and also has them come back 24 hours later to test how well they have learned the melodies. What do you think? Which group learns the melodies better?

Contextual Interference

As I discussed in my last post, studies have shown that practicing motor tasks in a blocked fashion leads to better performance during the practice sessions, compared to random practice. However, retention is better when tasks are practiced in a random fashion. What this means is that our long-term memory is better for tasks practiced in a random fashion. This is known as the contextual interference effect.

However, most of the research that has looked at this effect is based on simple laboratory tasks. In real life, tasks involve complex sensorimotor feedback and have multiple components that we have to control at the same time. This is particularly true in music practice. Practicing music involves visual cues from the music we’re reading, somatosensory feedback from the positions and actions of our joints and muscles, and auditory feedback from the sounds we’re creating. We have to pay attention to pitch, rhythm, tone quality, evenness, dynamics and articulation. In a complex task like this, does the contextual interference effect still apply? Is it stronger or weaker?

The Clarinetist Study: Stambaugh (2011)

For the clarinetists discussed above, the contextual interference effect seemed to be slightly weaker. The researcher, Laura Stambaugh, found that both groups made about the same amount of mistakes, but the speed at which the two groups played the melodies differed. During the first half of the trials of each melody, the group practicing in a blocked fashion was able to play faster than those practicing in a random fashion. For the second half of the trials of each melody, the random group was able to play faster. And when tested 24 hours after the end of practice, the random practice group played significantly faster than the blocked group.

From Stambaugh (2011). Journal of Research in Music Education 58:368

In other words, the blocked group initially seemed to learn better, since they were able to play faster, but the advantages of practicing in a random fashion became apparent even before the end of the practice sessions. In the classic contextual interference studies, random practice led to worse performance throughout practice, so Stambaugh's result is a little different. There are a couple of possibilities for this difference: it could be just because the practice was split over three days, or it could be because in this study the participants are children rather than adults. Other studies using children have found that the contextual interference effect is not necessarily the same for children. Some studies have found that children do not necessarily perform better while practicing in a blocked fashion compared to a random fashion. It's a good reminder: We need to be cautious in applying the results of psychological studies done on adults. Because children’s brains are still developing, they may not operate in the same way, and so the lessons learned from adults may not apply.

Worth the Effort

In any case: Stambaugh’s clarinetists confirm that mixing up the order of our practice sessions may be worth the effort. I think this is particularly true for certain types of practice. When students are preparing for exams and have to be able to play scales in a number of different keys, practicing these in a random fashion is definitely effective. It can be hard to convince our brains to change between key signatures, so practicing making this switch would certainly help.

When students play for me during lessons or classes, they (or their parents) will often say that they “played it better at home”. And I’m sure it’s true. Partly this is due to nerves at the lesson, but I also think a large part of the reason students play worse in class is because at home, they play the piece several times, not just once like they do in the lesson. Probably the first time they play the piece in a practice session at home, it’s not a lot better than what they play for me. By the third or fourth time playing the song through at home, it’s pretty good. But at the lesson, they only get to play once. And this is true for exams and performances as well. If students practiced more in a random fashion, they would play better the first time. Performance, whether at an exam, recital or a lesson, is always in a random fashion, and we need to be ready for that.

Mixing it Up!

2011-11-15T11:26:00.000-08:00

I’ve enjoyed the comments and feedback generated by my last post about spacing of practice sessions. I think the most valid point was that students are pretty much going to practice at times that best fit their schedule, no matter what the teacher suggests. And this is okay; the best practice plan is the one that the student will actually stick to. Another comment that’s worth relaying is that many advanced musicians, especially string players, need a long warm-up to get their bodies ready to practice the hard passages, which makes it more time-consuming and less practical to split practice sessions up.

Target Practice

Still, for my young students, I think I’m going to try instituting something I’ll call “Target Practice”. I’ll give them a couple of sticky-notes with bulls-eye stickers on them. Each day in their practice they will pick the two most difficult bits of their songs (a bar or two, say), and label them with the sticky-notes. Then, they should come back for a second mini-practice session at a different time of day, and play just those labeled bars 5 times each. I’ll let you know how this goes and whether they actually do it. And I’m going to try it myself. I’ve been practicing the flute a lot lately, for an upcoming show, and there are a couple of almost unplayably hard bars that could really use some extra work.

Here’s something else to think about:

While researching the spacing effect, I ran across a most interesting study about organization of practice sessions. In this classic 1979 study (by Shea and Morgan in 1979) participants learned three similar motor tasks, which consisted of using their hands to knock over targets in a certain order. There were two groups: Group A practiced each motor task in a block, then moved onto the next task, while Group B practiced the tasks in a random order, with the three tasks all mixed up, something like this:

As you might imagine, Group B made more errors while practicing than did Group A. The surprise result came when the two groups came back to be tested on the tasks 10 days later. Group B, who had practiced a in a random order, performed better than Group A, who had practiced in a blocked order. In other words, random organization of practice material led to worse performance during the practice session, but better learning overall.

Contexual interference

Researchers believe that this is because mixing up the tasks during learning makes the learning harder; psychologists call this contextual interference. It improves learning because when we practice in a random fashion, we have to use alternate cognitive strategies to learn the tasks. In other words, we have to think harder, and that makes us learn better. Random-ordered practice is harder, requires more neural processing and therefore recruits more brain areas. This leads to stronger retention.

What does this mean for music practice?

These contextual interference studies lead to some interesting conclusions about how we might structure our music practice sessions. The standard practice method is for us to practice our scales, then move on to arpeggios and other technical exercises, and then practice our pieces in a blocked fashion, meaning we practice one piece until we’re done with it for the day and then move on the next piece. And while this way of organizing our practice leads to better performance during our practice session, it may not be the most effective for overall learning. For maximal learning, it seems we should mix up our practice material: practice one piece for a short time, then our scale, then another piece, then the arpeggios, then back to the scale… etc. This is a bit of a revolutionary idea, because it is not how we normally practice.

Before we change all our practice schedules…

The downside to random practice is that it might not be as satisfying to practice this way, because our performance during the practice session would be worse. Therefore, I certainly would not recommend this for students who are struggling or already disheartened by their level of achievement. It might work well to start the week out practicing in a blocked fashion, to gain a sense of mastery over new pieces, and as the week goes on, transition to a random organization of practice material.

As a teacher and as a musician, I want to know: is it really worth the effort to reorganize all our practice material? Just how much benefit would there be to practicing in a random order rather than blocked? Are there any studies that show the effects of random organization of musical practice? In fact, there is a recent study looking at exactly this, and that is what I’ll blog about next time…

The Spacing Effect

2011-11-08T14:27:00.000-08:00

Which do you think would lead to better piano playing: practicing one day a week for three hours or practicing 6 days a week for half an hour a day? In both cases the total time spent practicing per week is the same (3 hours). For most people, this is a no-brainer: we always suggest once-a-day practice. It seems most logical to space out the practice sessions to once a day to promote better learning. We know from experience that this works.

The Spacing Effect

There is a well-known psychological phenomenon called the Spacing Effect, where people learn better if learning sessions are distributed across time, compared to learning in one big massed session. This was first shown in the late 1900’s, and has been extensively studied since then.

But why does it work? Why isn’t it just the total number of hours you spend learning something that determines how well you learn it? There are a couple of different answers to this question. The first is that fatigue and attention span limit the useful length of a practice session. It’s just not reasonable to expect someone to practice for three hours solid and expect them to be putting in the same amount of mental and physical effort at the end that they were putting in at the beginning. Also, there is evidence that when we are repeating something right away, we naturally do not pay as much attention the second time. And, as I’ve discussed, attention is critical for learning

Spacing of Practice Promotes Synaptic Plasticity

The second, and perhaps more scientifically interesting answer, is that the physical processes in the brain that lead to learning seem more activated by spaced training sessions. When we learn something, the connections between neurons, known as synapses, get stronger, making certain patterns of neuronal firing more likely to happen. This synaptic plasticity involves cascades of chemical interactions between molecules in the synapse. When we interrupt practice sessions with gaps, the chemical interactions are more strongly activated, making the synapse stronger. From a psychological standpoint, the spacing effect works because retrieving a memory makes the memory stronger.

Optimal Spacing of Practice Sessions

Practicing once a day for 30 minutes definitely makes more sense than practicing once a week for 3 hours. But would it be even better to practice twice a day for 15 minutes? Or three times a day for 10 minutes each time? What is the optimal spacing of our practice sessions? I’m personally very curious about this, but there are no clear answers to these questions. However, it seems to me that the optimal length and spacing of practice sessions will be determined by the material that needs to be practiced. A beginner student might benefit by practicing her short pieces in two-minute sessions, while an advanced student needs to spend more time at each practice session in order to really “get into” the practice and make some improvements.

Rubin-Rabson (1940)

But I’d still really like to know if practicing twice a day would benefit musicians more than practicing once a day, even if the total time spent practicing were the same. Is it better to have a night’s sleep between practice sessions, so sleep-dependent consolidation of the memory can occur? Or would it be better to practice in two or more sessions per day to try to maximize the spacing effect? The only research paper I could find on this particular question was a study from 1940 by Rubin-Rabson. In her study on memorization, experienced pianists practiced some pieces, either in one practice session, in two shorter practice sessions within one day, or in two short practice sessions over two days. Which practice regimen led to better learning? She tested this by having the pianists come back two weeks later and relearn the pieces. Those who had practiced on two separate days had the easiest time relearning the pieces, those who practiced two sessions on one day were in the middle, and those who had used one massed practice session had the hardest time relearning. The conclusion was that spacing out the practice sessions promoted better learning.

The spacing effect in daily practice

The problem with this study is that it is hard to apply the results to our regular daily practice. How often do we learn a piece in one practice session and then have to play it two weeks later with no practice in between? What I really want to know is if I should suggest to my students that they split their practice into two sessions per day, practicing each piece in both sessions. My guess would be that their performance would improve more quickly. Has anyone tried this? I’d love to hear your comments.

Music Training and Executive Function

2011-11-01T11:11:00.000-07:00

I’m going to take a break here from the neuroscience of practicing to discuss a new paper published this month in the journal Psychological Science. But before I get to the paper, I’d like to tell you about one of my students.

Meet Ellis

Ellis, a scraggly-headed 6-year-old with intelligent brown eyes, is sitting on my piano bench for "solo time" during his weekly piano class. He’s a smart little guy, and I’ve been teaching him since he was three and a half. He plays very well for his age, and seems to like piano, despite a tendency to try to distract me into chatting instead of listening to him play.

We’ve just started learning the key of F major, and he struggles to remember that in his new songs, every B should be B flat. It’s remarkable to me that as he plays, I have to remind him at every single B. “B FLAT!”, “No, that should be flat”, “FLAT! FLAT!” Why can’t he get this in his head? The next week, Ellis gets most of the B’s right, but a few B naturals still sneak in. His mother shrugs and shakes her head. Then I hear him play a piece he’s been working on for several weeks, in C major, and I am stunned to hear him adding in B flats! What is going on here?

Ellis is having a hard time with rule switching. Ever since he started playing the piano, the rule was that when he saw a B on the page, he played a B on the keyboard. Simple. Now we’ve changed that rule. In F major, when we see a B in the music, we have to play a B flat. And then when we change back to a song in C major, B means B natural again. The rule keeps switching.

Executive Function

Rule switching is one of group of higher cognitive skills collectively known as executive function or cognitive control, and which reside in the prefrontal cortex, right behind your forehead. Executive function includes three main skills: working memory, which is keeping things in mind in the short-term, inhibition (i.e. self-control), and cognitive flexibility, which includes rule-switching. The prefrontal cortex is one of the last parts of the brain to fully develop in children, which explains why kids have a hard time controlling their behaviour (they’re still developing that self-control), and also explains Ellis’s problems with rule-switching. Executive function in children is a predictor of success in school, even more so than IQ.

Musical Training improves Verbal Intelligence and Executive Function

In a paper published this month, researchers at York University led by Sylvain Moreno compared the effects of music training and visual arts training on verbal intelligence, spatial intelligence, and executive function. They ran a summer camp for two groups of 4- to 6-year-olds, with one group receiving two hours a day of music training, and the second group receiving two hours of visual arts training. The music curriculum included instruction on pitch, rhythm, melody, singing and music theory including note-reading. The visual arts curriculum included instruction on shape, colour, line, dimension, and perspective. The researchers figured that music training might enhance language skills, while visual arts training might enhance spatial skills. What they found was that only the music training led to improvements in verbal skills and executive function, and neither training enhanced spatial skills.

Why does music training improve executive function?

I’ll talk about the effect of music training on verbal skills another day. It’s interesting and relevant, but today I’m more interested in the effect of music training on executive function. The task used to probe executive function in these children tested both working memory and inhibition. The researchers suggest that music training uses parts of the brain that control executive function, and this is why the training improves these skills. Studying music requires concentration, memorization, and attention, and enhances these skills in children. That enhancement can then transfer to executive function in general.

I’ve long thought that music training must improve executive function, simply because it requires the use of executive function. This study looked at the effects of short-term, beginner music training in a classroom setting. Just imagine how much executive function improvement results from daily instrumental music practice! Children learn self-discipline, use focused attention, working memory, and, as we have seen, rule-switching. Music study constantly stretches the limits of these brain functions, making them stronger and more capable. And these cognitive abilities are useful for a huge variety of life-tasks, including schoolwork.

Ellis will eventually get the hang of switching between key signatures, and by doing so, will increase his general ability to rule-switch. This strengthening of neural circuits in his prefrontal cortex will give him an advantage in many aspects of life.

Sleep and Memory Consolidation

2011-10-25T12:28:00.000-07:00

One year, when I was a teenager, my high school put on the musical Cabaret and I was volunteered into the role of pianist for the show. I was handed a huge binder containing a piano reduction of the orchestral score and told to go to it. I accompanied rehearsals, helped weak singers learn their parts, and played in the pit orchestra. And what was extremely clear to me was that I was not actually a good enough pianist for the job. That music was hard! I wasn’t experienced enough to be able to figure out what bits to play and what to leave out, and so struggled along trying to play every single note.

At the end of each day, I would fall into bed exhausted, and every night I would dream I was playing the piano. Not just some random dream where I was playing: in every dream I was sitting at the piano, looking at the music for Cabaret, actually expending mental energy to play the notes in front of me.

Sleep and Learning

I hadn’t thought much about that time-period in years, but when I read a recent paper, it all came back to me. The paper, written by Simmons and Duke in 2006, looked at the role of sleep in solidifying memories. The researchers taught a simple piano melody to two groups of volunteers. One group learned the melody in the morning, and was tested to see how well they played it in the evening. The second group learned the melody in the evening and was tested in the morning. The results were striking: the second group (tested in the morning) showed a huge improvement in performance compared to the night before, while the first group showed no improvement. The only real difference between the groups was that the second group had had a night’s sleep.

Data from Simmons and Duke (2006). PM/AM refers to the group that practiced in the evening and was retested in the morning (after sleep). AM/PM refers to the group that practiced in the morning and was retested in the evening.

Sleep enhances memory consolidation

This study is just one of a number of recent studies showing the role of sleep in memory consolidation. Consolidation is an important stage of memory formation, in which recently formed memory traces are made resistant to interference, strengthened, and anatomically rearranged in the brain. Studies have shown that for motor memory, there is definitely consolidation happening during non-REM sleep (the deep sleep when we’re not dreaming). Sleep deprivation blocks memory consolidation and so sleep-deprived people do not show an improvement in performance the next day.

Role of REM vs. non-REM sleep

But let’s step back a second… I just said that consolidation definitely happens during non-REM sleep, when we’re not dreaming. But at the beginning of this post I was talking about how much I was dreaming about piano practice. So what’s the relationship? Well, non-REM sleep has been shown to be critical for motor sequence learning, when we’re learning a pattern of movements, like learning a particular new song. So sure, when I was struggling with the piano score for Cabaret, I was learning new songs, and that required non-REM sleep. But there was so much new music that I was also learning how to sight-read better. That’s not a new motor memory, that’s a new skill. Skill learning like that is a form of sensorimotor learning, where we have to take sensory input and translate it into the appropriate motor response. And that type of learning requires REM sleep, the sleep in which we're dreaming. When people are intensely learning a new skill or immersed in a new language, the proportion of time they spend in REM sleep has been shown to increase. And depriving people specifically of REM sleep inhibits their learning.

Playing difficult music day in and day out, like I did with Cabaret, is an intensive learning situation, and probably the repeated dreams I experienced were related to memory consolidation during REM sleep. I literally was practicing in my sleep.

All of this is to say that sleep (both REM and non-REM) is absolutely critical for stabilizing and improving memories. Just by sleeping, you can improve your music performance. Getting a good night’s sleep on a regular basis is probably the best thing you can do to improve your ability to learn.

Deliberate Practice and the Role of Attention

2011-10-20T12:32:00.000-07:00

Deliberate Practice is most effective

Thinking about playing music while you’re playing music is a good start, but what really makes practice most effective is to always be striving for improvement. Our goal should be that each practice session consists of deliberate practice. Deliberate practice is an idea from K. Anders Ericsson, a professor at Florida State University, who studies how people become experts at something:

In contrast to play, deliberate practice is a highly structured activity, the explicit goal of which is to improve performance. Specific tasks are invented to overcome weaknesses, and performance is carefully monitored to provide cues for ways to improve it further. We claim that deliberate practice requires effort and is not inherently enjoyable. Individuals are motivated to practice because practice improves performance.

-Ericsson, Krampe & Tesch-Romer (1993)

This idea of deliberate practice is relevant because sometimes students (or their parents) assume that it would be better just to play for fun most of the time, instead of spending time practicing seriously. A parent might say to me, “Little Matilda is so musical and just loves playing the piano, so I don’t want to squelch her enthusiasm by making her play scales”. And of course enjoyment of playing is important, and there is value in spending time improvising or just “noodling” on the piano, but if students really want to improve as pianists, deliberate practice is the most effective way.

Playing “just for fun” does not make you a better musician

A 1996 study by John Sloboda and his colleagues compared five groups of children who were or had been taking music lessons. The highest-achieving group consisted of children who were at a special music school, the second group included children who had applied but not been admitted to music school, the third group was children who had considered applying to the school, the fourth group were “regular” children taking music lessons, and the lowest-achieving group was children who had played an instrument in the past but had quit. When Sloboda looked at how much time children in the different groups had spent practicing, there was a clear correlation between the hours they had practiced over their lifetime, and the quality of their playing. By age 13, children in the high-achieving group had practiced twice as many hours as the children in the second group, and more than five times as many hours as the children who subsequently gave up playing their instrument.

From Sloboda et al. (1996)

There is a very clear correlation between hours spent in serious practice and the level of playing. In contrast, when Sloboda looked at how much time had been spent playing “for fun”, there was no correlation. The high-achieving group did not spend significantly more time playing previously-learned pieces, improvising, or fooling around on their instruments. It was hard practice, with their attention focused on improving their playing, that led those children to be better musicians, not playing for the sheer enjoyment of it.

Why is deliberate practice better than just playing music?

You might think (and we often do think this) that simple repetition is enough to make us learn. If you play a tune enough times, you’ll eventually know it well, whether or not you were paying full attention while you were playing it, right? Well, yes and no. You can learn something up to a certain level of proficiency without giving your full attention, but it takes a lot longer, and you won’t master it to the same level you could if you were really focusing on learning.

The difference at the level of the brain seems to be based on the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, which plays an important role in learning. When we are paying attention to something, a part of the brain called the basal forebrain is activated, and releases acetylcholine into the appropriate parts of the brain for learning that particular task. Neurons that are active and have acetylcholine released onto them will be more plastic and this helps us lock in our memories of whatever we’re paying attention to.

Deliberate practice, that is, paying attention to your practice and focusing on improvement, is the most effective way of learning to play music.

References:

Ericsson KA, Krampe RT Tesch-Römer C (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review, 100(3), 363-406.

Sloboda JA, Davidson JW, Howe MJA, Moore DG (1996). The role of practice in the development of performing musicicans British Journal of Psychology 87:287-309.

Attention in Music Practice

2011-10-17T08:54:00.000-07:00

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.

Explicit and Implicit Memory in Learning Music

2011-10-12T13:32:00.000-07:00

Welcome to “Training the Musical Brain”, a blog combining my interests in neuroscience and music pedagogy. I believe that neuroscience, psychology and related areas of research have a lot to tell us about the affects of music on the brain, and about the best ways to optimize our musical training.

I’m going to start off the blog by giving a summary of a talk I gave this fall at the Music for Young Children (MYC) Conference, in Princeton, B.C. The topic was “The Neuroscience of Practicing”, a subject dear to my heart because my passion for neuroscience began with an interest in memory and learning, and that lead me to pursue a degree in neuroscience. Because the talk was long, I’ll split it into a number of blog posts.

Practicing is the way we learn, the way we store facts, events or skills in memory. You might think that your music teacher is doing all the teaching, and that the learning that you do is passive (you just sit there and absorb what she says, right?) but it doesn’t work that way. Learning is an active process on the part of the learner, and the teacher’s main job is as a guide. It is during your practice time that most of the learning happens.

There are two main types of memory systems: explicit memory and implicit memory, and studying music uses both of them. Explicit memory is memory for facts and events: when we learn that the key signature of G major is F#, this is stored in explicit memory. Implicit memory, on the other hand, is the memory for skills and habits. We use a lot of implicit memory in playing the piano. When we learn a new scale or a new piece of music, we practice it until we can play it without too much conscious effort. We don’t have to think about every single note every time we play it. Implicit memory is sometimes called motor memory or muscle memory. I don’t like this last term because it implies that the memories are stored in your muscles, which they are certainly not. Motor memory involves a part of the brain called the cerebellum, which has a role in linking sensory input to motor commands. In this way, the cerebellum takes the sensory feedback that you get from playing the piano (like the way the piano keys feel, how you have just moved your fingers and arms, and the sound that you have just produced) and links it to the motor command that was just sent out to the muscles. It also links it to the next command that will be sent, so that a whole sequence of motor commands and sensory inputs is linked together in memory.

When we perform music, we need to use both implicit memory and explicit memory. Many pianists have had the experience of playing the piano using implicit memory only; it seems like the hands can play the piece without any input from the brain! That’s actually not true: unconscious parts of the brain like the cerebellum and basal ganglia are telling the motor cortex what commands to send to the muscles, but it feels like the brain is not involved because these are unconscious processes. The downside of this automatic type of playing is that often pianists find that if they start thinking about what they’re playing, they make a mistake and are unable to continue playing the song. What’s happening here is that the conscious parts of our brain are sending commands to the motor cortex that interfere with the commands coming from the cerebellum, and so we get mixed up. The solution to this problem is that we should not let the performance of a piece get too automatic. How can we accomplish this? The best way is to form explicit memories of the piece alongside the implicit memories. For instance, you could analyze the chord structure of the piece and memorize that, so you would know what chord you should be playing at each moment. Or you could form an explicit memory of what notes you should be playing at the beginning of every fourth bar (or each phrase). Or whatever works for you. The key thing is to at least have some explicit memory of the song, even if it is just every few bars, that way if you lose your automatic train of thought, you have an explicit landmark to go back to, so you can get back into the song and continue playing.

This was my first main point of the talk: When learning music, it is important to form explicit memories along with implicit memories.