Piano Forum

Here is an interesting article on the topic;

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/practice-alone-does-not-make-perfect-studies-find/

First of all their definition of "deliberate practice" as it applies to actual music studies is by far rather random and various. They have no standard measurement as to what actually defines deliberate practice, the participants are asked to practice in any way that they actually know themselves or have been taught. This of course is a problem as many music teachers would realize with transfer students. The amount of students who really don't know HOW to practice and instead merely repeat inefficiently or use tools at a very basic level (hands separate, slow practice etc). This problem exists in a large amount of students who have not been taught appropriately HOW to practice. The difference in rate of learning from a student who practice merely with brute force practice vs a student who uses a refined approach to their study methodology GLARINGLY creates a large difference (this is of course assuming the students has no problems with the discipline of practice itself and educators will know this is certainly a factor contributing to progress). This is however not the intertest of the authors here and it is obvious it CANNOT be their focus because it goes into far too much detail.

This paper was cited in your link:
General Discussion section page 8
https://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Macnamara-et-al.-2014.pdf

"Moderator analyses revealed that the strength of the
relationship between deliberate practice and performance varied by domain. In terms of percentage of variance in performance explained, the effect of deliberate
practice was strong for games (26%), music (21%)...."

What the other % that improved the performance is left as UNKNOWN. Well thats great isn't it? Unknown means it also can relate to the way the person practices beyond the papers surface layer understanding of what constitutes "deliberate practice".

The paper cited here also states regarding this above:
"In the first ever actual test of Ericsson's initial claim, Brooke Macnamara, David Hambrick, and Frederick Oswald recently reviewed a large number of studies conducted since that 1993 paper. They found that sheer amount of deliberate practice does not, in fact, explain most of the differences in expert performance. Additionally, there were huge differences between fields, with effects for education and professions much smaller than for games, music and sports"

First what do they mean "differences in expert performance"? For an expert performance to occur one would imagine that you would need expertise to know how to practice efficiently to gain that level in the first place. What repertoire level are they considering, what quality of playing exactly are they discussing? As we know measurement of what constitutes a better expert performance to the other is VERY VERY difficult to measure. If you have experience looking at jury results of large piano competitions you will see the numbers do vary by a large margin. To expertly perform something requires that you have practiced a lot to get to that point, so it's just utterly confounding what they are trying to mean as it applies to music education (a point they do not elaborate on since it is not specific to music but a broad range of activities).

In the last two sentences he wrote "They found that sheer amount of deliberate practice does not, in fact, explain most of the differences in expert performance. Additionally, there were huge differences between fields, with effects for education and professions much smaller than for games, music and sports"

So he says in one breath deliberate practice does not explain most of the differences, but then there was less differences found in music, which means practice has a larger effect on outcome, and as the other paper I quoted stated around 21%. Still this % would increase even further if we took into account HOW exactly they were practicing and removing inefficiencies in that. This is an action I see in students over the year all the time.

Flexible mnemonics as it applies to piano study for example can accelerate a students progress a large amount. I am not talking about memorising line and space notes with sentences and words (fixed mnemonics), I am talking about how one actually uses the choreography hands, the logic of the fingering and pattern recognition and how this connect this to the sheet music which is then influenced by the 3 levels of memorisation (Conscious, Muscular and Sound). 

This kind of deep discussion as to what deliberate practice as it applies to high level piano study is certainly beyond the scope of any broadrange analysis of multiple disciplines. We would need a paper which specifically looks at piano education to get stronger data.



"Further analysis revealed that the effects of deliberate practice were stronger for highly predictable activities (e.g., running) compared to less predictable activities (e.g., handling an aviation emergency). "

All pianists realize that we face often a mix of predictable and less predictable circumstaces. If you play a piece that is well under your ability level then the predictability goes up a large amount. So it is irrational to believe that any activity remains segregated in either of these predictability slots and instead move between them. What influences predictablity then? Funnily enough the more you practice the more things look the same and predictable, so what are they really trying to say here?


This is a breif analysis of what the paper discusses when we turn its attention towards piano study. The paper of course is not specifcally for piano study but is trying to look at many activities as a whole. It admits there are variations in effect of practice vs improvement.