Learning How to Practice Takes Practice

Abstract

Effective music learning depends on effective music practice. Although time spent with teachers is an important component of young musicians’ development, time spent alone practicing is perhaps even more consequential. Researchers and teachers have offered many prescriptions about effective music practice, yet observations of young musicians’ actual practice reveal that their behavior in the practice room is often quite unlike what teachers envision. The most important aspects of effective practice are the thinking, perceiving, and decision-making that serve to organize how musicians spend their time. We discuss how to help students focus their attention in ways that lead to the successful accomplishment of musical goals.

Photo of Micah Killion by David Zacek

Photo of Robert Duke by Judith Jellison

Independent practice is a central feature of nearly all musicians’ experiences, from the beginning stages of music-making and throughout their musical lives. Although it seems undeniable that students can learn a great deal from their teachers during music lessons, rehearsals, and classes, the development and refinement of skills requires that learners focus attention on tangible goals during independent, iterative practice. The amount of time devoted to music practice differs among individuals, of course, in relation to learners’ goals and levels of motivation.

Teachers often advise students who show little progress from one lesson to the next to “practice more,” assuming, perhaps mistakenly, that the practicing taking place in private is consistent with what the teacher has in mind. But thoughtful teachers well understand that it is not the amount of time spent practicing that is most important. It is instead the nature of the activities that students engage in as they work to improve their skills ¹ that determines the extent of student accomplishment. In fact, directives to practice more may actually be counterproductive if what students are doing on their own is inconsistent with the behaviors that lead to productive outcomes. Perhaps music teachers should replace the phrase “practice more” with “practice better.”

But how can better practice emerge? The fundamentals of human learning and procedural memory refinement suggest that better practice is unlikely the result of teachers’ telling students how to behave in the practice room. Instead, students will benefit most as teachers guide them through iterative experiences that engender the habits of thinking that underpin effective learning.

Learning to Move, Moving to Learn

All skilled movements are acquired through a process of iterative practice. Learning to walk, shoot a basketball, sing a melody, and play the violin all require multiple attempts to accomplish movement goals. These goals may begin as small approximations of what learners eventually are going for, but each repetition provides information that the brain uses to update procedural memories (memories for how to do things) in ways that eventually lead to greater accuracy, facility, and fluency. ²

All stages of skill learning include mistake making. And mistakes—discrepancies between movement goals and momentary movement outcomes—contribute to the refinement of skills. It may seem counterintuitive to assert that mistakes contribute to skill development, but this is most certainly the case. Goal-directed movements are guided by memories of past experiences, and feedback obtained from past actions over time informs the brain’s predictions that given movements will lead to the accomplishment of intended outcomes in the future. ³ Much of this learning is implicit, operating below conscious awareness, which is why it is impossible to talk a student (or oneself) into playing in tune, hitting a jump shot, or riding a bike.

The brain is a prediction machine, anticipating what is about to happen on the basis of stored memories of what has happened in the past, and all motor behavior depends on the quality (accuracy) of momentary predictions. This is true for everyday behavior, such as walking or grasping objects, and for more complex skills, such as driving a car and hitting a baseball. The iterative aspect of skill learning and the memories that form as a result of what learners experience contribute to the accuracy of learners’ predictions about what will likely happen next.

If one expects that a given sequence of movements will lead to a desired outcome and all goes as expected, then there is really nothing new for the brain to learn. But if the outcome is something other than what is expected or desired, the discrepancy between the intention and the outcome contributes to the accuracy of predictions about the movements involved in the next iteration and may lead to increases in accuracy and fluency.

Music Instruments and the Voice

To play or sing in tune with a consistent tone requires innumerable physical adjustments on nearly every pitch. Playing a one-octave major scale on a saxophone, which, like all wind instruments, is inherently out of tune, requires ongoing adjustments to air speed, tongue placement, and facial musculature on almost every note. Many of these adjustments are so small and happen so quickly that it would be impossible to consciously control all of them. So how does one learn to make those adjustments reliably? By having vividly imagined goals, recognizing discrepancies between intentions (the goals) and outcomes (the attempts to accomplish the goals), and adjusting motor behavior in ways that shrink the discrepancies in subsequent attempts. Verbal instructions about intonation tendencies may help a player or singer get closer to the goal, but learning to play or sing in tune consistently requires multiple iterations in which goals are conceived, discrepancies are perceived, and adjustments are made. This is as true for artist-level professionals as it is for beginners. ⁴

Given the vital role of effective practice in developing and refining musical skill, ⁵ it is interesting to consider how infrequently aspiring novices observe expert practice. ⁶ Violinist Hilary Hahn, who has admirably worked to demystify what happens in her own practice, said in an interview with The New York Times, “As a student I never saw someone practice,” ⁷ an experience apparently shared by many musicians young and old. Although it is considered foundational to observe and analyze the performances of great artists, few students get to see and hear how expert musicians practice.

Researchers Stephanie Pitts and Jane Davidson offered a particularly bleak look inside the practice room of students ages nine and ten:

The children we observed did not seem to have a real idea of why they were playing through their repertoire, although all had good recollection of what they had been asked to do. They were sometimes aware that a particular piece had not gone very well, but were only conscious of difficulties when they struggled or stopped, rarely picking out small-scale or even global errors such as inaccurate rhythm or pitch, poor tuning, or unpleasant tone. ⁸

More recent research has continued to show that many young musicians do not practice strategically ⁹ and that observations of inefficiencies in music practice extend to older, more experienced, and more highly skilled musicians as well. ¹⁰

Not What I Intended

What might explain the extent to which musicians often seem to practice ineffectively? Perhaps it pertains to a fundamental misunderstanding about mistakes and mistake making. The terms “error” and “mistake” in many classrooms and studios have come to be associated with sounds that are not represented in the printed music: a wrong note, a missed key signature, or an incorrect rhythm or lyric. If students go through years of instruction being asked by teachers to fix such mistakes, then it is unsurprising that many students come to believe that a goal of practice (if not the goal) is to eliminate mistakes and play exactly what is on the page. But principles of human learning suggest a more interesting and powerful role for mistake making in effective practice.

What is typically referred to as a mistake is better understood as the perception of a discrepancy between what was intended and what actually happened. ¹¹ As we explained earlier, perceptions of discrepancies lead to changes in memory that potentially influence what happens in the next trial. ¹² Research on music practice reveals that the occurrence of errors in practice is not what separates the most accomplished musicians from nonexperts. ¹³ It is not the case that experts make fewer mistakes than do novices during practice. In fact, experts often identify discrepancies between their practice intentions and outcomes as frequently as do less experienced musicians. But there are important differences in the nature of the errors that experts perceive and in how, when confronted with discrepancies, experts respond.

Experts are guided by a vivid auditory image of how they intend to sound, and this clear intention serves as point of comparison for every performance trial. Subtle deviations from that auditory-motor-expressive intention pave the way for subtle improvements in prediction, perception, and action. Whereas a young musician may identify as a discrepancy singing B-natural instead of B-flat, an expert may perceive that a phrase ending did not end as quietly and beautifully as intended.

When experts recognize discrepancies that cannot be resolved by mere repetition, they perform a seemingly simple and remarkably effective operation: They “doable-ize” the problematic passage(s), that is, they modify subsequent performance trials in ways that transform undoable passages into ones that can be performed as intended in the next few repetitions. They accomplish this by employing many of the devices that are often described as strategies (e.g., they play more slowly; they repeat a troublesome slur) with the goal of rendering an undoable challenge doable. Doable-izing is a foundational feature of expertise: recognizing obstacles to beautiful performance and immediately altering what is performed to allow for the successful accomplishment of proximal (near-term) goals while maintaining the fundamentals of beautiful tone production and expressive inflection.

Strategies That Are Not Strategies

Teachers often refer to practice activities—such as repeat, go slower, isolate a smaller passage, modify the range, sing on a neutral syllable, play one hand at a time (for pianists or string players), or perhaps simplify the rhythm or articulation patterns ¹⁴ —as practice strategies. Although these are all activities that effective practicers may do, ¹⁵ none of these activities, by itself, constitutes a strategy.

A strategy is a procedure for accomplishing a goal. ¹⁶ If one were to ask a master chef to reveal a strategy for preparing a favorite dish, the phrase “add salt” would reveal little about the recipe for success. Yes, salt is an important part of many recipes, but a good cook must decide if, when, and how much salt to add to accomplish a culinary goal. These are the decisions that transform an activity (add salt) into a strategy to reach a goal (make tasty food). Advising a student to “slow down” is just like that. How slow? When? How much of the passage do I play slowly? When do I go back to performance tempo? What should I be listening for? What should it feel like? Answers to those questions constitute a strategy. “Slow down” does not. In fact, slowing down can be an effective modification only for passages that are difficult because of the tempo. In some instances, playing or singing at a slower tempo may make a passage more difficult.

An Outline for Effective Practice

The most important and often unasked question underpinning strategic practice is, “Given what just happened, what should I do next?” Here is what experts do: They change the challenging passage in a way that makes it (or part of it) beautifully playable or singable right away (they doable-ize), changing no more than is necessary to retain the original context of the passage to the maximum extent possible.

At The University of Texas at Austin, our analyses of artist-level musicians’ practice consider not only what expert practicers do (the activities) but also why experts do what they do when they do it (the strategy). ¹⁷ Our observations of students at various skill levels, like the observations of Pitts and Davidson, reveal many opportunities for students to think and act more strategically. Students are often admonished to pay attention to the sounds they produce, and following an attempt at a passage, many young players can report details about which notes they thought were performed correctly and which were not. But students appear far less attentive to consistently envisioning a vivid image of a given passage before they play or sing (recent research suggests that these representations likely combine auditory and motor imagery). ¹⁸

The absence of a vivid expectation limits what can be learned from the next attempt. Without a clear intention, learners respond to what is most salient about what they do, and often, what is most salient to the learner is not what is most important. The question arises then: What do students need to develop the habit of strategic thinking? First, what students do not need is a lengthy explanation of the psychology of skill learning. Instead of being talked into practicing better, students at every stage of music learning benefit by experiencing strategic practice, often under the guidance of a skillful teacher. These are experiences that give students opportunities to make choices about what musical task should come next and make discriminations between what they want to happen and what actually comes about. Such experiences early in music study lay the groundwork for a future of independent learning. Older students also benefit from being guided through experiences that draw their attention to how strategic, effective practice feels and sounds.

Effective habits can develop as musicians consistently reduce the discrepancies between intentions and outcomes and are regularly reinforced by the reward of successfully singing or playing what was once undoable. The habits of thought underpinning Hilary Hanh’s ability to master a new concerto are the very same habits that a lead beginner violinist to play early Suzuki tunes expressively, beautifully, in time, and in tune. Effective practice leading to lasting advantageous changes in ability is available to all vocalists and instrumentalists, and students benefit from more opportunities to think like artist-level musicians.

So, what can teachers do to create such thinking in young learners? Let us be clear that this is not accomplished by telling students how to practice. Anyone who has observed students practicing, even students who have been told what to do during practice, has been more than a little surprised by the ineffectiveness of students’ use of practice time. Rather than merely telling, teachers should “practice students” in their presence (in class or in lessons). In other words, by guiding students through the thinking and decision-making that contribute to effective practice, students experience effective practice under the guidance of a skillful teacher. Over time and with strategic questioning, teachers can cede more and more of the responsibility for deciding what to do next to their students, with the expectation that that same decision-making will be incorporated into practice time.

In summary, consider that students need to develop the habit of thinking clearly about how they intend to sound (and feel) in each trial before they play or sing. It is not necessary for them to verbalize their intention, but a vivid ideal is an integral feature of advantageous skill learning. For many students, this may begin by inserting short pauses before performance trials, with a prompt to imagine what their next attempts should sound like and feel like. Performing approximations, such as conducting, chanting, or singing a passage, can help instantiate a habit of conjuring vivid intentions.

Then, consider that students need to notice discrepancies between what they intend and what they do in each attempt and make strategic decisions about how to doable-ize based on what they hear and feel. Instead of immediately telling a student what you notice about their playing, consider first asking them what they noticed. If they perceive that something did not sound or feel as intended, ask them to modify the passage to obtain a result that is exactly what they intend within the next few repetitions.

The most effective way to help students increase their technical and expressive fluency is to teach them to learn more during independent practice, and the key to developing productivity in the practice room is helping students think the way that artist-level musicians think. Rather than simply informing students what they should be doing during practice, teachers can design experiences that guide students as they formulate clear, vivid auditory and physical goals for each performance trial; notice discrepancies between what they intend and what happens; and then strategically doable-ize subsequent trials in ways that render challenges surmountable while retaining the fundamentals of beautiful singing and playing. Approaching music practice in this way leads to more consistent fundamentals, more frequent successful iterations, and thus a greater sense of accomplishment, agency, and joy in the practice room.