Are Pianists Different? Some Evidence from Performers and Non-Performers

Abstract

Following in the tradition of work by Gruson (1988) and Miklaszewski (1989), some evidence about the nature of the cognitive processes operating during music production activities was gathered. Eight musicians (four performance majors and four non-performance students), matched for age and relevant musical experience, sight-read, rehearsed and performed a musical composition for piano. Exploratory data analysis of objective observations and subjects' verbal protocols revealed differences between the two groups in terms of their procedural representations of the music. The data are interpreted in terms of a theoretical model predicated on the assumption that performance skill is a function of the distribution of attentional resource between the musical foreground and the musical background, which effectuate surface level and deep-level cognitive processing respectively.

The hypothesis that skilled and less-skilled performers differ with respect to basic cognitive processes provides an alternative to Sloboda's (1985) assertion that performance skill level is determined by the amount of relevant practice undertaken.

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