• Practice, learning and memory, part III

    And a few more practice strategies to ensure effective learning and memory: 5) Practice extremely slowly.  There has been a controversy for some time about whether slow practice is beneficial for learning fast music.  Many of us were told early in our musical lives that in order to play a passage of music that is very fast,…

    Read more…

  • Practice, learning and memory, part II

    Almost everyone who plays the piano has, at some point in his/her study,  learned Chopin’s Prelude in A Major, Op. 28. Only 16 bars and lasting a bit less to a bit more than a minute (depending on the performer), the Prelude is deceptively simple. A few repetitions and it feels as though we have it…

    Read more…

  • Practice, learning and memory, part I

    None of my teachers ever spoke with me about how to practice.  They didn’t suggest strategies or give me tips.  I guess they assumed, since I memorized so easily, that I didn’t need any help.   I had what’s called a “good ear,” and I could hear the piece in my mind.  By the time I had…

    Read more…

  • From sight-reading to memorized performance

    If you have performed from memory, you no doubt have had the experience of an audience member coming up after a concert and saying in amazement “How did you learn so many notes?” In the last few posts about memory, we’ve talked about learning and memory as two sides of the same coin,  about the many…

    Read more…

  • Memory and falling dominoes

    The Starry Night is regarded as one of Vincent Van Gogh’s best works and is probably one of the most well-known images in art, having been appropriated for everything from mugs to mouse pads to desktop wallpaper. I recently happened upon a very unusual version of Starry Night – a video of the iconic image created by falling dominoes.  As I…

    Read more…

  • The many kinds of memory in music

    In music we often talk about auditory, visual, and motor memory.  But outside of the music world, we encounter a dizzying array of memory terms. We read about  short-term vs. long-term, explicit vs. implicit, declarative vs. procedural, semantic vs. episodic –  and more.    So what do all of these terms mean in relationship to memory…

    Read more…

The Musician’s Brain

The Musician’s Brain is a blog by Lois Svard, a musician who has written and lectured extensively about the applications of neuroscience research for the study and performance of music. She is Professor Emerita of Music at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, and is the author of the book The Musical Brain about music, the brain, and learning.

Subscribe to the blog

Archive

Categories

Absolute Pitch (3) Alzheimers and music (1) Amusia (1) Beat-deafness (1) Benefits of studying music (7) Brain Hardwiring for Music (2) Brain Patterns (1) Celebrate music (1) Cognition (1) Cognitive bias in music (1) Compulsion for music (2) Emotion (1) Exercise (1) Hearing (1) Hearing loss (1) Improvisation (1) Infants and language (1) Infants and music (5) Learning and memory (10) Medical problems of musicians (1) Memory (1) Mirror Neurons (8) Miscellaneous (1) Music and teamwork (1) Music and wellness (1) Music as therapy (1) Music Cognition (3) Music Education (1) Musician's Brain Webinar (1) Musicians' Anatomy (1) Music in times of crisis (3) Musings (2) Neuroplasticity (1) Origins of music (2) Performance (9) Practice (5) Rhythm (1) Sensory Information (0) Sleep (2) Synesthesia (5) Vision (1)