The effects of sensory deprivations during the initial practice of short piano pieces: An experiment with four students at different academic levels

Abstract

This article discusses the effects of sensory deprivations during the initial practice of four short piano compositions in both deprivation and postdeprivation situations. Four different experimental conditions were employed: (A) deprivation of the piano, with visual decoding of the score; (B) deprivation of the piano and score, with auditory decoding of a commercial recording of the practiced composition; (C) deprivation of the sound response, with the score being decoded in a turned-off digital piano; and (D) deprivation of the score, with the recording being decoded on an acoustic piano. Four participants, all piano students, were part of the research sample: one who was taking piano classes in the university’s extension program; two undergraduate participants, a sophomore and a senior; and a student in the graduate program. Three participants managed to recreate the auditory information they did not have as a function of the condition of deprivation based on their own manipulations and aural skills. The effects of the deprivations on the four participants while practicing raised their awareness of how to use their personal skills to extract information from their practice sessions and affected their aims regarding the pieces they practiced.

Keywords

sensory deprivation piano practice expertise levels

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Altenmuller

E. O.

Bangert

Liebert

Gruhn

(2000). Mozart in us: How the brain processes music. Medical Problems of Performing Artists, 15, 99–106.

Altenmuller

E. O.

Furuya

(2016). Planning and performance. In Hallam

Cross

Thaut

(Eds.), The Oxford handbook of music psychology (2nd ed., pp. 529–545). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Banton

L. J.

(1995). The role of visual and auditory feedback during the sight-reading of music. Psychology of Music, 23, 3–16. doi:10.1177/0305735695231001

Brefczynski-Lewis

J. A.

Lewis

J. W.

(2017). Auditory object perception: A neurobiological model and prospective review. Neuropsychologia, 105, 223–243. doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2017.04.034

Brodsky

Kessler

Rubinstein

B.-S.

Ginsborg

Henik

(2008). The mental representation of music notation: Notational audiation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 34, 427–445. doi:10.1037/0096-1523.34.2.427

Brown

Palmer

(2012). Auditory–motor learning influences auditory memory. Memory & Cognition, 40, 567–578. doi:10.3758/s13421-011-0177-x

Crollen

Albouy

Lepore

Collignin

(2017). How visual experience impacts the internal and external spatial mapping of sensorimotor functions. Scientific Reports, 7, 1022. doi:10.1038/s41598-017-01158-9

Deutsch

(1999). The processing of pitch combinations. In Deutsch

(Ed.), The psychology of music (3rd ed., pp. 248–325). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

Gabrielsson

(1999). The performance of music. In Deutsch

(Ed.), The psychology of Music (pp. 501–602). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

10.

Gieseking

Leimer

(1972). Piano technique. New York, NY: Dover.

11.

Ginsborg

(2005). Strategies for memorizing music. In Williamon

(Ed.), Musical excellence: Strategies and techniques to enhance performance (pp. 123–141). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

12.

Gohil

Hahne

Beste

(2016). Improvements of sensorimotor processes during action cascading associated with changes in sensory processing architecture–insights from sensory deprivation. Scientific Reports, 6, 28259. doi:10.1038/srep28259

13.

Gruson

(1981). Rehearsal skill an musical competence: Does practice make perfect? In Sloboda

(Ed.), Generative processes in music: The psychology of performance, improvisation, and composition (pp. 91–112). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

14.

Keller

(2012). Mental imagery in music performance: Underlying mechanisms and potential benefits. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1252, 206–213. doi:10.1111/j.1749-6632.2011.06439.x

15.

Kilteni

Andersson

B. J.

Houborg

Ehrsson

(2018). Motor imagery involves predicting the sensory consequences of the imagined movement. Nature Communications, 9, 1617. doi:10.1038/s41467-018-03989-0

16.

Kuhtz-Buschbeck

Mahnkopf

Holzknecht

Siebner

Ulmer

Jansen

(2003). Effector-independent representations of simple and complex imagined finger movements: A combined fMRI and TMS study. European Journal of Neuroscience, 18, 3375–3387. doi:10.1111/j.1460-9568.2003.03066.x

17.

Lehmann

(1997). Acquired mental representation in music performance: Anecdotal and preliminary empirical evidence. In Jørgensen

Lehmann

(Eds.), Does practice make perfect? Current theory and research on instrumental music practice (pp. 141–164). Oslo, Norway: Norges musikkhøgskole.

18.

Mantovani

M. R.

Gerling

C. M. P. C.

Dos Santos

R. A. T.

(2015). The effects of sensory feedbacks privation (auditory, kinesthetic, and visual) during the initial approach to piano pieces. International Symposium on Performance Science 2015, 2015, Kyoto. Abstracts of the International Symposium on Performance Science 2015 (vol. 1. pp. 66–67). Kyoto: Ryukoku University.

19.

Marvin

E. W.

Laprade

P. A.

(1987). Relating musical contours: Extensions of a theory for contour. Journal of Music Theory, 31, 225–267. doi:10.2307/843709

20.

Miller-Keane

(2003). Miller-Keane encyclopedia & dictionary of medicine, nursing & allied health. Philadelphia, PA: Saunders.

21.

Nielsen

S. G.

(1999). Learning strategies in instrumental music. British Journal of Music Education, 16, 275–291. doi:10.1017/S0265051799000364

22.

Nurminen

Merlin

Bizanjadeh

Federer

Angelucci

(2018). Top-down feedback controls spatial summation and response amplitude in primate visual cortex. Nature Communications, 9, 2281. doi:10.1038/s41467-018-04500-5

23.

Palmer

(1992). The role of interpretative preferences in music performance. In Jones

Holleran

(Eds.), Cognitive bases of musical communication (pp. 249–262). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

24.

Repp

B. H.

(1996). The art of inaccuracy: Why pianists’ errors are difficult to hear. Music Perception, 14, 161–184. doi:10.2307/40285716

25.

Repp

B. H.

(1999). Control of expressive and metronomic timing in pianists. Journal of Motor Behavior, 31, 145–164. doi:10.1080/00222899909600985

26.

Stephan

Lega

Penhune

(2018). Auditory prediction cues motor preparation in the absence of movements. NeuroImage, 174, 288–296. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2018.03.044

27.

Vercillo

Jiang

(2017). Spatial modulation of motor-sensory recalibration in early deaf individuals. Neuropsychologia, 102, 39–44. doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2017.06.002

28.

Wöllner

Williamon

(2007). An exploratory study of the role of performance feedback and musical imagery in piano playing. Research Studies in Music Education, 29, 39–54. doi:10.1177/1321103X07087567

29.

Woody

R. H.

(2020). Musicians’ use of harmonic cognitive strategies when playing by ear. Psychology of Music, 48, 674–692. doi:10.1177/0305735618816365

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB

0.14 MB