Pianist Arthur Rubinstein is said to have learned Franck’s Symphonic Variations by engaging in mental practice on a long train trip, playing it on a piano for the first time at the first rehearsal.
Is this just the stuff of legend? Or are feats of learning like this possible for us “normal” folks?
Wouldn’t it be great if there were a study that looked at whether it’s possible for us to learn, memorize, and play new music without the benefit of an instrument to practice on?
A study!
A team of Italian and German researchers (Bernardi et al., 2013) conducted a study with 16 pianists (ranging in age from 18 to 36, each with at least 15 years of piano study).
The pianists were given two comparable 19-measure excerpts to learn – from two different Scarlatti sonatas (K72 and K113). Why these two in particular? The researchers wanted to make sure that technical difficulty wouldn’t be a factor, and both of these excerpts were easy enough to be sight-readable by every participant.
Mental practice vs physical practice
To compare the effectiveness of mental practice vs. physical practice, the two excerpts were learned on two different days.
On one day, the pianists engaged in 30 minutes of mental practice on one excerpt, and then gave a performance of it from memory.
On another day, the pianists engaged in 30 minutes of regular physical practice on the other excerpt, and gave a performance from memory.1
And was there any difference in how much of the music they could play from memory?
Note recall
When it came to the number of notes participants could recall correctly, 30 minutes of mental practice enabled pianists to get about 63% of the way through the excerpt before stopping.
That’s not bad, but physical practice was more effective – getting the pianists about 84% of the way through the excerpt.
So thus far, the results suggest that mental practice is better than nothing, but not quite as good as physical practice. Which makes total sense, of course.
But wait – there’s a twist (because there always is, right?).
10 more minutes!
After the first performance test, all of the pianists were given 10 more minutes to practice, and then one final performance test.
So for those doing physical practice, this meant a total of 40 minutes of piano time before a second and final run-through. And for the mental practicers, it was an opportunity to spend 10 minutes on a real, physical piano, before their final test.
The question being, would a little bit of physical practice help the mental practicers catch up to the physical practice group?
An equalizer
As it turns out, yes!
After 10 minutes of physical practice, the mental practice folks were able to get 83% of the way through the piece! Which was statistically no different than the 90% that the physical practice group was able to achieve on the same piece.
All this to say, mental practice by itself led to a level of playing that the researchers note was about 40-60% of the same number of minutes of physical practice. Which by itself isn’t bad – but with that initial mental work under their belt, it took only 10 minutes of physical practice to get to around the same level of performance as 40 full minutes of physical practice.
What about playing quality?
That’s pretty cool – but what about the quality of their playing, beyond just playing the right notes? Like, when it came to articulation and phrasing, dynamics and expression, and so on, did one type of practice lead to more compelling performances than the other?
Three professional musicians rated the quality of the participants’ recorded performances.
And much like with memory, 30 minutes of mental practice with 10 minutes of physical practice seemed to result in a level of performance that was pretty much the same as 30 minutes of physical practice.
40 minutes of all-physical practice did lead to a slightly higher level of performance than 30 minutes of mental practice and 10 minutes of physical practice. But that’s kind of to be expected, right? And the researchers made a point of noting that the difference was quite small.
Main takeaway
There was a bit of variation from pianist to pianist, so a bit of caution is probably not a bad idea. And remember too that the music the pianists learned was not very difficult technically. But the study does align with the other research in this area which suggests that mental practice plus physical practice can be an effective combo indeed.
Something you can definitely take advantage of if you’re on a plane, train, or automobile, and don’t have access to your instrument. Or if you’re trying to save your chops after a double rehearsal. Or working your way back from an injury.
But what did mental practice look like exactly? What were these pianists actually doing in their heads during their 30 minutes of no-touching-the-piano-allowed time?
What did mental practice look like?
The researchers dug a little deeper, and found that strategies ranged from mentally hearing the sounds of the notes to score analysis to imagining the feel of the correct hand/finger movements to singing out loud.
Based on the results, here are a few of the researchers’ recommendations:
- Auditory imagery – or hearing the notes on the page, “should be a default operation, a foundation on which other operations rest.” This seemed to be particularly important, as the pianists who scored higher on an aural skills test they took, not only seemed to memorize more of the music, but received higher overall performance scores from the judges too. So if you’ve been looking for a reason to pay more attention in ear training class, I guess now you’ve got one!
- Analysis – figuring out the harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic structure of the piece is another important aspect of mental practice.
- Listening to recordings – could be helpful, to help build up a clearer auditory model of the music in your head. As long as you don’t get too attached to only one particular way of thinking about the piece, of course, without taking the time to explore the score more deeply.
Do you struggle with mental practice?
I think we’ve all heard stories about the effectiveness of mental practice – but have you ever struggled with it? Like, maybe your mind starts to wander? Or you fall asleep? Or you have difficulty imagining, hearing, seeing, or feeling exactly what you want in your mind – or controlling it?
If you’ve wanted to do mental practice but weren’t sure exactly how. Or tried mental practice before, but didn’t have much luck with it, you’re not alone. There are new approaches to mental practice that have been developed in the last few decades that are often more effective than the approaches to mental practice we used in the past.
I put together a mental practice course that will guide you through these new protocols, and it’ll be open for a limited public beta in a couple weeks. If you’d like to get a heads-up about this when it’s available, you can join the notification list here:
🎓 Click Here to Join the Mental Practice Reboot Waitlist
A book – and how you could shape it
This is one of the posts I plan to draw on for a book I’m considering. One aimed at addressing those oh-so-frustrating “but it sounded better at home” moments, with research-based guidance on how we can shrink the gap between how we sound in the practice room and how we sound on stage. The idea is short, focused chapters, each addressing a specific frustration, with concrete action steps.
The community is central to this project, as each chapter will close with real-world examples from students, teachers, and professional musicians – showing how the principle plays out in actual practice, performance, or teaching.
If you’ve applied any concepts from this post to your own practicing, performing, or teaching, and found them helpful, I’d love to hear your story. Like, when do you use mental practice? What exactly does it look like for you? What do you find it most or least helpful for? How do you teach students this skill? What are the little “pro tips” related to this that you’ve discovered over the years? 😁
A short note is totally fine! Because if your story seems like a good fit, I’d love to set up a short conversation to hear more.
👉 Click here to email me your story
📚 Click here to follow the project
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References
Bernardi, N. F., Schories, A., Jabusch, H.-C., Colombo, B., & Altenmüller, E. (2013). Mental Practice in Music Memorization: An Ecological-Empirical Study. Music Perception, 30(3), 275–290. https://doi.org/10.1525/mp.2012.30.3.275
Amazing post. I wonder how you do, how you manage to write in your own writing style and deliver the study to us as well. Probably because it’s your job and because you have a lot of experience. I am impressed how you can make a boring scientific study interesting. Maybe it’s because you are convinced of something because of your experience and this motivates you getting it proved or demonstrated by other researchers. I appreciated the puns a lot. I always do in general. The picture is beautiful. As a student, this is really helpful. Bravo and thank you very much.
i find that i can practice mentally for longer periods of time than i can easily do with instrument in hand. physically playing on the instrument is more fun though, and gives the illusion of being easier to focus on the playing. but physically playing also makes it easier to go through the motions mechanically.
so bottom line is that when i really want to learn/memorize a stubborn piece or passage, i can make more progress with mentally practicing (for longer periods of time). for easy stuff i usually can just do physical practice. takes less mental effort, which allows me to have more mental energy left over to apply to mental practice. (if i’m having a good day.)
thank goodness we have both options to choose from. choices, choices…
Gary Berlind
There’s a flaw in the study being the level of prior mastery of the two techniques. So I’d like to see the levels attained by pianists that use ‘Mental Practice ‘ regularly.
Good to see Aural Skills always high on the agenda of skills.
Thanks for the information.
Thank you for the excellent article! In addition to Chris’s point, I wonder if the music pedagogy community’s current paradigm of mental practice offers maximum effectiveness, or whether alternative approaches may radically out perform traditional mental practice (with its foundation of a auralization first)
A linguistics/cog-sci informed approach to mental practice would suggest that working macroscopically down from big-picture meaning and phrase structure down to individual notes might be more effective. If we learned a speech we would focus on the ideas and then make sure we got the individual words, then hone the sound of each word. We wouldn’t start by trying to memorize the sound of each word.
You have written about this before, that a big picture-first approach is more effective in learning. The way that I’ve seen auralization-based mental practice described (and the way I have tried it), does not seem to fit with this idea of prioritizing the big picture.
I have had great success following this kind of mental practice approach:
Read the passage as if I was reading a book, to understand the ideas and gestures.
Test my recall of these ideas and gestures
Identify locations where I am not mentally fluent with the notes (individual words), do what’s necessary to become fluent (usually setting the intention to become fluent and staying focused on this attention will guide the way towards organic mastery)
Once my concept is very clear, flesh it out on my mental representation of my instrument. Include kinesthetic and emotional as well as aural imagination.
Build my way back to a feeling of wholeness and meaning with the added instrumental imagination.
Anybody else work like this? Any suggested tweaks, or possible pitfalls to this approach?
Thanks Marc,
good to get an upgrade on the Mental Practice approach.
I was recently given a book called Psycho-Cybernetics and at one point describes a brain surgeon accidentally touching the cortex of a patient (awake under the knife) and they were re-living experiences (full of sight, sound, smell) from a long-forgotten memory from their childhood.
If we can get the inputting of the music down to a fine art then the total recall (sorry;) is (using above as evidence) entirely possible (also ‘memory palace’ concepts etc)
if you don’t mind I’m going to copy/paste you approach for trying out in a Jazz leadsheet experiment for this weekend and see if I can also involve the learning of chord symbols fluently.
Great post, as always. I too question the research on mental practice if the pianists involved don’t know how to use it as a tool. In my early study, I’d try mental practice with mixed results. Later I studied with a Boulangier student who insisted that we mentally memorize and write out our pieces before we ever try to play them- after a period of comprehensive analysis. In summary, we mastered the material, then memorized it, then played it, and it worked wonderfully if you were patient enough to try it. So 19 bars of Scarlatti, a piece of staff paper, and 30 minutes, and I would think everyone should get close to 100% with this method.
Great post!
I believe mental practice, just like physical practice, takes time to master. I think the results would be different if the pianists all utilized mental practice in their daily routines and not just for this study.
Still a very interesting study.
I have a twist to add to this idea. I’ve not previously used mental practice on a regular basis. I also experience a lot of insomnia on a nightly basis. And Noa has written previously about the importance of sleep in improving performance, memory, and allowing new skills or practice results to mentally “set.” So recently, I’ve begun using mental practice at bedtime. An intense concentration on one piece (especially visual imagery of the score) really focuses my mind and shuts out the skittering “thought racing” that spirals out of control in insomnia. I have found that it dramatically reduced the time it takes to sleep, without struggle and a more relaxed state. I don’t have concrete proof, but I think my playing has improved, perhaps by facilitating internalizing the music into the subconscious. I used this as a polishing technique for a recent performance, and feel it really helped solidify the memory weak spots and increased my confidence. Whether or not it actually “works” musically, at the very least it’s an effective sleep aid with no harmful side effects– and it might really help!
Hi Cindy:
About six months ago, on this Bulletproof Musician blog, i learned about something that has helped my playing — and my entire life! — enormously. I suggest you take a little time and check it out.
http://www.headspace.com
Regards,
Gary Berlind/
Great stuff Gary,
I’d just heard this ‘Headspace’ term mentioned on the author Tim Ferris audio-blog recently interviewing the chess genius (from the book/film ‘Searching for Bobby Fischer) Josh Waitzken. People should have a listen…this guy has applied being genius to some beautiful life-concepts too.
Anyway, thanks for the reminder!
My college piano teacher Aiko Onishi used to have us all learn a “no touch” piece once a semester. We each had to then present the work in front of the other student and Onishi.
Very stressful.
Visual memory skills help.
Eons ago, I was a senior in high school preparing for my conservatory auditions. I also had been struck with a terrible case of tendonitis that wasn’t improving. I ended up learning the concerto I was working on in a month, utilizing extensive visualization techniques and only 15 minutes/day of practice. At the time, I thought it was a pretty miraculous feat, and definitely agree mental practice can be an effective tool.
Nice article! Really interesting how mental practice can augment physical practice. I’ve found that mental practice really solidifies my technique and helps me overcome second guessing myself.
Here’s what I do, I call it “Netflix Practicing.” I turn on my show (currently House of Cards) and throw on some open back headphones with my metronome as soft as it can be and practice scale technique ad naseum while watching. Something about having that external distraction forces my muscle memory to take over and it’s super effective! I’d be curious to know if you know anyone else who has done something like this?
By the way, love your blog! It’s a great resource, so thank you!
Reese, I have read or seen in a Graham Fitch tutorial (Pianist Magazine) something similar to your Netflix idea. It’s contrary to the usual practice advice of being super focused on the music, and narrowly designed “soley” to strengthen muscle memory, only. (Muscle memory being just one of 4 or 5 types of memory needed to achieve super solid memorization). The suggestion is to play the piece or passage, while simultaneously reading a passage from a book OUT LOUD. The idea is, if the brain is engaged in a such a distinctly separate task as reading a book aloud, it’s fairly certain that only muscle memory is at work. Great for solidifying muscle memory, but Noa and many others have cautioned that it is the most fragile memory type, and most susceptible to breakdown in performance situations. Might be great for simple scale work, though.
Do you have any advice regarding practicing when one has the flu? Does anything stick? I’ve lost over a week and am getting nervous…
Thanks –
Tim
Mental practice was useful for me as a vocalist. I went over and OVER my recital pieces in my head away from the practice room. When it came performance time, my brain was programed as if hundreds of successful concerts were already in my history, what’s one more show? It made a difference in my anxiety level and contributed to not only my emotional security but the persona I was able to project. I’m a believer!
[…] practice is widely studied and is a wonderful way to progress more quickly while avoiding tension […]
[…] practice is widely studied and is a wonderful way to progress more quickly while avoiding tension […]
[…] To compare the effectiveness of mental practice vs. physical practice, the two excerpts were learned on two different days. On one day, the pianists engaged in 30 minutes of mental practice on one excerpt, and then gave a performance of it from memory. On another day, the pianists engaged in 30 minutes of physical practice on the other excerpt, and gave a performance from memory.1 […]
I find this all very interesting. Many years ago I used mental practicing in preparing for playing the piano for the musical “Fiddler on the Roof” at my local community college. I was going to be gone for a week prior to the rehearsals beginning and took my music with me even though I knew I would not have access to a piano. I figured it was better than nothing. I found that “pretending to play” as in going through the motions of playing even though I was in essence playing “air piano” helped quite a bit. Of course, I did not have anything to compare it to other than knowing that I wouldn’t even be as familiar with the music if I’d left my music at home!!
My piano teacher commented a few times about students of hers that didn’t have a piano to practice on, but would practice on a pillow and she was pleased with the results. I’ve also have students of mine say that they would take their piano book out at school during a break or study time and play “air piano.” I encourage them to do so because sometimes the difference is simply the confidence of knowing they are more prepared than they would have been if they’d waited for an opportunity to practice at home.
Thank you so much for the additional scientific info!!
It’s really anomaly especially in Malaysia as none of my teachers have ever suggest me to mental practice until I watch the Nodame Cantabile anime, when she mental practising on the train, I did try it very few times when I can’t touch piano, but didn’t really notice the difference, but still better than nothing, and it’s actually very hard, especially the harmony part, sometimes I really don’t have memory about the harmony part, guess I still not really know what’s the music going on.
Maybe the piece(s) could have been learnt to near the same level by physical in 10 minutes to start with?