“Why would that be the case?” he argued right back. “If you really know something, you should be able to repeat it accurately as often as you want to.”
Fatigue is real. Even machines can’t repeat actions indefinitely without needing a rest or maintenance. A more relaxed version of L’s statement is true, in that the ability to repeat something accurately more than once is one way to measure how well you know something. I’d expect this measure to correlate with, say, the ability to reproduce the piece in performance—but imperfectly. At a certain point, other constraints become binding. Have you practiced in front of an audience? On a piano other than your own, in a room other than where you’re used to practicing, in a different emotional and physical state than you’re used to?
I’d also caution that defining your “win” condition as “played the passage X times perfectly” has an Achilles’ heel, which is that it incorporates a lot of randomness. If you think of each play-through as having a P% probability of success, then you can achieve the win condition at an arbitrarily low value of P by playing a sufficient number of times. This can lead to frustration (if it goes on too long without success) or to illusory success (if you get lucky).
The way I’ve always suggested my students cope with this is by selecting the dimensions of their passage intelligently. They should pick a passage length that they feel confident they can play correctly on their first or second try. if that fails, they should shorten the passage significantly and try again, until they’ve found a portion of the passage—even a single note or chord—that they can play on their first or second try. Then they can start trying to combine these fragments into a longer whole.
This tends to be uncomfortable at first, because a good composer writes their music in such a way that you always want to hear one more note—kind of like how a good video game makes you want to play just one more turn. It also forces students to break out of their ruts. But, especially with adult students, they’ve tended to like it once they get used to it and find that it’s helpful to them.
But the probability of success increases as you accumulate previous successes, right?
And there’s a difference between “play 5 times perfectly” and “play 5 times perfectly consecutively.” Much more randomness (and potential regression to the mean) if you are allowed to have imperfect runs between your perfect ones.
For sure! I think people are trying to get a couple different things out of practice quantification:
Self-evaluation: evidence of their skill level
Decision-making: a criterion for deciding when marginal practice time is best spent elsewhere
Motivation: appreciating their successes, having a sense of progress, building consistency over time
It’s both tricky to know which one you’re doing, and also to do it effectively.
For self-evaluation, I think it’s most helpful to make your evaluation as similar to what you’re actually aiming for as possible. If you want to be able to perform in public without memory slips, then arrange some public performances to test whether you’re able to do this or not. A nursing home is great for this—or was before the pandemic, anyway. If you want to be able to accurately play long passages with no warm-up, then start by trying to play short passages with no warm-up. Being very clear about exactly what you’re evaluating, and having a sense of some alternatives, in order to select the most relevant test, is helpful here.
What I really think is important is to focus on “converging lines of evidence.” Playing in front of a crowd on a piano that’s not your own, being able to play accurately on your first time, being able to start in the middle of the piece, and being able to play at a variety of tempi give you a lot more information about your skill level than being able to play a particular passage accurately even 100x in a row.
For decision-making, the reason I think it’s best to move on after one success is that going too deep on one area tends to mean people don’t practice their entire piece, or get hyper-focused on one piece at a time. Also, memory research shows that small bits of practice on particular chunks of information spread out over time are more effective than overlearning the chunks all at once. So “STOP AFTER WIN” tends to spread efforts out more, which I think leads to more effective practice.
For motivation, “STOP AFTER WIN” produces a string of happy-feeling successes.
I agree with you on ALL OF THIS. Make your evaluation as similar to what you’re actually aiming for as possible, make sure you don’t neglect any sections of music and/or allow previously learned material to degrade, spread effort over time aka spaced repetition.
BTW, in our house we’re building a “piano performance ladder” (house concert, smaller venue, bigger venue, duets with other musicians, etc.). My mom used to teach this kind of thing to kids—play for parents first, then grandparents, then church or nursing home, etc. It holds up for adults too...
Fatigue is real. Even machines can’t repeat actions indefinitely without needing a rest or maintenance. A more relaxed version of L’s statement is true, in that the ability to repeat something accurately more than once is one way to measure how well you know something. I’d expect this measure to correlate with, say, the ability to reproduce the piece in performance—but imperfectly. At a certain point, other constraints become binding. Have you practiced in front of an audience? On a piano other than your own, in a room other than where you’re used to practicing, in a different emotional and physical state than you’re used to?
I’d also caution that defining your “win” condition as “played the passage X times perfectly” has an Achilles’ heel, which is that it incorporates a lot of randomness. If you think of each play-through as having a P% probability of success, then you can achieve the win condition at an arbitrarily low value of P by playing a sufficient number of times. This can lead to frustration (if it goes on too long without success) or to illusory success (if you get lucky).
The way I’ve always suggested my students cope with this is by selecting the dimensions of their passage intelligently. They should pick a passage length that they feel confident they can play correctly on their first or second try. if that fails, they should shorten the passage significantly and try again, until they’ve found a portion of the passage—even a single note or chord—that they can play on their first or second try. Then they can start trying to combine these fragments into a longer whole.
This tends to be uncomfortable at first, because a good composer writes their music in such a way that you always want to hear one more note—kind of like how a good video game makes you want to play just one more turn. It also forces students to break out of their ruts. But, especially with adult students, they’ve tended to like it once they get used to it and find that it’s helpful to them.
But the probability of success increases as you accumulate previous successes, right?
And there’s a difference between “play 5 times perfectly” and “play 5 times perfectly consecutively.” Much more randomness (and potential regression to the mean) if you are allowed to have imperfect runs between your perfect ones.
For sure! I think people are trying to get a couple different things out of practice quantification:
Self-evaluation: evidence of their skill level
Decision-making: a criterion for deciding when marginal practice time is best spent elsewhere
Motivation: appreciating their successes, having a sense of progress, building consistency over time
It’s both tricky to know which one you’re doing, and also to do it effectively.
For self-evaluation, I think it’s most helpful to make your evaluation as similar to what you’re actually aiming for as possible. If you want to be able to perform in public without memory slips, then arrange some public performances to test whether you’re able to do this or not. A nursing home is great for this—or was before the pandemic, anyway. If you want to be able to accurately play long passages with no warm-up, then start by trying to play short passages with no warm-up. Being very clear about exactly what you’re evaluating, and having a sense of some alternatives, in order to select the most relevant test, is helpful here.
What I really think is important is to focus on “converging lines of evidence.” Playing in front of a crowd on a piano that’s not your own, being able to play accurately on your first time, being able to start in the middle of the piece, and being able to play at a variety of tempi give you a lot more information about your skill level than being able to play a particular passage accurately even 100x in a row.
For decision-making, the reason I think it’s best to move on after one success is that going too deep on one area tends to mean people don’t practice their entire piece, or get hyper-focused on one piece at a time. Also, memory research shows that small bits of practice on particular chunks of information spread out over time are more effective than overlearning the chunks all at once. So “STOP AFTER WIN” tends to spread efforts out more, which I think leads to more effective practice.
For motivation, “STOP AFTER WIN” produces a string of happy-feeling successes.
I agree with you on ALL OF THIS. Make your evaluation as similar to what you’re actually aiming for as possible, make sure you don’t neglect any sections of music and/or allow previously learned material to degrade, spread effort over time aka spaced repetition.
BTW, in our house we’re building a “piano performance ladder” (house concert, smaller venue, bigger venue, duets with other musicians, etc.). My mom used to teach this kind of thing to kids—play for parents first, then grandparents, then church or nursing home, etc. It holds up for adults too...
I like the idea of a piano performance ladder! Gives some built-in social validation to the work of learning piano music.