Photo: Yan Krukov

Is playing piano just muscle memory?

It doesn't actually record or retain a memory in your muscle, but rather the nerves associated with that muscle. Essentially, when you repetitively practice a movement, you are changing the way your brain reacts to these movements resulting in quicker, repeated motions. You're actually expanding your brainpower!

hellosimply.com - Learning To Play Music: The Phenomenon of Muscle Memory

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What Exactly is Muscle Memory?

Muscle memory is an amazing thing when it comes to learning to play music. It doesn’t actually record or retain a memory in your muscle, but rather the nerves associated with that muscle. Essentially, when you repetitively practice a movement, you are changing the way your brain reacts to these movements resulting in quicker, repeated motions. You’re actually expanding your brainpower!

The Beauty of Muscle Memory

Just like anything you do in life, the more you do it, the easier it gets. Muscle memory can stay with you for a very long time. Like the old phrase says, “it’s just like riding a bike”, so you’ll regain your muscle memory quicker than if you were starting from scratch. In fact, skilled pianists use their motor network less than inexperienced pianist when it comes to complex hand movements. Just like running or walking, the movements become programmed and you no longer think, you just do! Taking it a step further, because muscle memory has already been formed when it comes to more experienced pianists and they do without thinking, this actually frees up time to focus on developing other skills.

Learning vs. Practicing

Here’s a really nice way to break down how you learn to play an instrument. Since muscle memory is built through strict repetition, the process of building up your muscle memory is actually the learning phase. Until you play something consistently correct, only then is it safe to say you’re practicing it. You must practice something in order to build muscle memory, meaning that muscle memory is only developed once you’re in the practicing phase.

Improve Your Muscle Memory With These Tips

Practicing twice a day and with shorter intervals between practice sessions, greatly increases your muscle memory! Practice slowly. This is the best way for your brain and muscles to learn. Set a timer or alarm and put it away from your field of vision so you aren’t focused on time and when the session will be over. The TV method. Sounds unconventional but in reality, well rehearsed repetitive actions are actually practiced better with TV on in the background (low to no volume). This strictly works the muscle memory in a distracting environment.

Be careful

If you don’t bother correcting your mistakes during the learning phase, you’ll soon form the wrong muscle memories. This will be extremely difficult to correct later on and I can probably bet you don’t want to spend numerous hours correcting these bad habits.

Are pianists fast typers?

An additional part of the study saw an amateur pianist trained over a six-month period to use the piano keyboard to type simple correspondence - resulting in the pianist being able to type sentences at 80 words per minute. The pianist could actually type emails faster at the piano than on a QWERTY keyboard.

classicfm.com - Pianists are like professional typists, says new study - Classic FM

Pianists are like professional typists, says new study

Piano players can 'play words' as quickly as professional typists can type them, a new study by the Max Planck Institute of Informatics has shown. The study created a series of musical 'sentences' that were comparable in difficulty and structure to common English words on a QWERTY keyboard, and then recorded the results of a pianist 'typing' the notes on a piano keyboard, resulting in the musical phrases being turned into English words. Antti Oulasvirta, Senior Research at the Max Planck Institute, said the results were surprising: "Without prior practice [the pianist] was able to enter text with a top speed of over 80 words per minute. This corresponds to the performance rate of a professional typist using the QWERTY keyboard." To map the QWERTY keyboard to the piano keyboard accurately, the researchers considered hundreds of common typing patterns and found the musical equivalent. For example, frequent patterns like 'th' were translated as a musical leap of a third or a fifth. Researcher Anna Feit described the technique to Phys.org: "We had to respect the note transitions and chords that occur frequently in music. No pianist can quickly play dissonant chords or very large intervals, thus our mapping had to avoid these." An additional part of the study saw an amateur pianist trained over a six-month period to use the piano keyboard to type simple correspondence - resulting in the pianist being able to type sentences at 80 words per minute. The pianist could actually type emails faster at the piano than on a QWERTY keyboard.

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