So there are changes in the brain with music training, that is not surprising but it also explains why it can be difficult to transfer skills over to older students.
It also depends what kind of profession those adult students had, for example I have taught two friends who are 70+ years old for about 3 years now, one was a dentist and the other a businessman. The dentist has understood coordination and fingering at the piano better than the businessman and I have an inkling that all the muscular memory and fine motor skills he used being a dentist helped in that respect. I have noticed benefits other disciplines have had on piano study, dancers for instance have a great sense of beat and timing and they know how to listen to music all very important skills to learn the piano. You can make all sorts of connections with other disciplines to music and they all will synergize with one another.
This makes sense to me because when I am playing something I am very emotional about and can play very well, I don't need to think so much in terms of what I am doing but rather enjoy the listening experience and what it feels like in my hands together as a whole.
Overall I like reading these kind of articles now and then but they often don't really tell me anything new, they often go into detailed anatomy which has little relevance to my music work and often their experiments are often severely short sighted with their sample space quite small.
I also don't like the idea of placing limitations on ourselves before we even give it a go ourselves, everyone is an individual and we don't all fit inside labelled boxes. It is no good thinking, "I'm old now and my brain plasticity is poorer, I should have started as a child!". The brain is a wonderful organ and I have seen people develop and improve at the piano at all ages and fully enjoy the experience. In fact the easy grades I play with some 70+ year old students bring them as much joy and frustrations as me playing a concert standard. We should consider relative improvement and enjoyment in an individual rather than consider what the maximum level could be.
I think it also has implications on how to teach adult students, as neuroplasticity works differently for adults than it does for children. This is my understanding -- there is a certain "gating" mechanism which makes it harder to activate the circuitry which results in neuroplasticity. There are two main ways to speed up learning in adults -- through urgency (adrenaline - stress, deadlines, pushing yourself) or through play (dopamine). For children, their minds are in a somewhat constant plastic state, so they tend to be more like little sponges. So, just exposing them to things will make them learn sort of automatically. If they just do scales and arpeggios all day long, the movements will become sort of ingrained. However, with adults, they will tend to learn how to do those very precise motions, but it will not as readily generalize to other pieces where they actually have to play scales in context. They may be able to play scales beautifully in context, but unable to play them as an exercise, or vice versa.
But on the other hand, it's not that adults can't learn things quickly, but that it's doesn't just happen if there is no strong motivating force.
You see it all the time where a lot of time is spent with very little reward. And that's why I think it's important to have a constant feedback loop. For example, I try and play at tempo if I want to play a fast passage. Because directly facing how inadequate your playing is right now forces you to improve. Otherwise, it is easy to contentedly play the same thing at half tempo forever, and assuming that it's even less likely for the skills of playing the passage at slow tempo to automatically generalize to playing fast as an adult, once they try to play faster they will simply be unable to.
This is very interesting, and makes perfect sense in the context of mental abilities as well. I've felt that the unlikeliest things could make a pretty big difference.
I was also a bit surprised that my dad was able to play a melody with both his hands within an hour, even though he had never touched a keyboard before. He has some experience with instruments (violin, flute) but not that much. He attributed being able to do that to the fact that he touch types every day at his job, and his typing speed is 90+ wpm from what I've seen.
...would it be more effective to try and feel the emotion quite strongly while you're learning, and would this have any implication on to what extent repetitive practice is feasible, due to the lack of emotional content?
Also, this might explain why technical skills don't always translate directly to producing music, because the brain processes might be different -- one for going through the motions, and another for playing something in the presence of high emotional content, and training one might not automatically train the other.
I find the data to often be useful, as it can often lead to ideas about which skills can easily be trained and which are fool's errands.
I tend to think a lot about whether it's possible to reach a really high standard of piano playing because that is something I would really like to do.
I don't really like measuring my progress against how well I did yesterday; I tend to measure it against theoretically how much I could have accomplished in the time frame, or what is be the best performance I can imagine. I know this is unusual, but it's a trait I've always had. I used to try and write fiction as a kid, and it was much more fluent than anyone else I knew at the same age. But that didn't matter to me -- it was much worse than actual fiction written by actual authors! Probably a disastrous line of thinking, but I can't help it!
When I seriously pick up something new, I tend to think about whether I can get to a level where I can come up with some fundamentally new insights or new ways of doing things. When I started, I was certainly thinking just how hard could it be, but now I'm getting a better picture of why they say it takes decades to learn the piano, that a lot of things which seem innate such as having the memory to play concertos without a score, is something which is trainable but takes years to master.
When I teach an average 5 year old beginner and compare it to say an average 70 year old, the OVERALL difference I find is negligible.
In the same respect I have taught naturally coordinated adults who have never played piano before and they develop very fast, their age has no effect on their acquisition of skills. Perhaps they could have done it faster as a child but who knows? Perhaps they have trained other skills which relate in some way to piano? The fact remains that their ability to learn is still at a very high level even as they age. The most extreme case of this I have experienced is a lady I taught when I first started teaching piano. She was in her 50s and pretty much devoted her life to her family and children. She did dabble with the piano here and there over the years but never took it serious or had time for lessons. After a couple years study with me she was would have been able to host her own concerts no problems at all. She also took up portrait drawing and then painting while we had piano lessons. She NEVER had done any drawing or painting before but she produced photorealisitc works which stunned her art teacher (and myself!!) who said they couldn't teach her anything at all! She was a real freak of nature with insane artistic capability and age did not slow her one bit.
The danger is that you can overstep the mark and spend a lot of time trying to stubbornly improve something because it allows you to "prove" something.
There are mental skills which are more strongly related to piano playing like being able to see the letters ABCDEFG in your minds eye and being able to skip around it and still be aware where all the letters are in relation to one another helps a great deal with reading calculation. Spatial reasoning tests like seeing a shape and rotating it and being able to visualize what it would look like, or seeing a series of patterns and infering what comes next, these kind of IQ type puzzles have connection to how we visualize shapes at the piano and how they interact with one another.
Mathematics also has a connection to piano of course. I taught one maths teacher and he would show me all sorts of maths ideas connected to music, I remember him showing x vs y notes with a mathematical proof to show how all combinatinos would work together.
There must be something in the genes of talented musicians, your father probably would be a fast learning pianist just as yourself and maybe even your mother and your grandparents.
When I teach students music they really like and are capible to learn in an efficient manner, they learn it many times faster than anything else.
This is diametrically opposing the viewpoint of working countless unknown hours on a single difficult piece until it is completed something that many people attempt to do. My students understand what works are too difficult and ineffient to focus on, this doens't mean they avoid it altogether but they certainly understand how much slower it is for them to obsess over them and they continue building their skills succesfully elsewhere.
The articles you posted are interesting but I feel that we should attempt things for ourselves before theorizing about it. There are already a lot of obstacles in peoples way to improvement.
If you asked me to feel that way as a teenager or young kid it would be very difficult. But because I have a very rich personal journey with music that no one else has had, this is very precious to me, it is not about other people it is about this mysterious personal journey I am having with music, and how it has given me Life. I am sure many other pianists will understand what I am saying here.
It is however quite difficult since the variation in people is immense. What works for one will fail for the other, some need 100 baby steps to get from point A to B, others can do it in one step.
I can see that they would probably learn easy material at similar rates, but do you find that adults tend to have a lower skill ceiling?
This is very interesting. I'm growing to realize that the differences in individual abilities and their trajectories throughout one's lifespan can be massive. The examples you mention of adults who have actually been able to . I find that in some ways the way I've learned the piano may not be that different from a child's -- I can often immediately observe and imitate hand movements pretty well for example, and I just hear the differences in sound with different approaches pretty well. I was earlier quite afraid that there would come some day when I would magically lose those abilities, but looking at people who actively maintain such abilities to learn (musicians, researchers, creative professionals, etc.) it seems like although it gets a bit worse, they usually retain those abilities well into their 50s and 60s.
There is a real danger here, but it can also drive one to improve (and I credit overstepping the mark to a lot of my progress). However, I think it's important to isolate key difficulties accurately, and try and work on those over a period of time, while not neglecting developing other skills. For example, you can fantasize about playing the two-handed scales at the end of the first Chopin ballade at tempo, and you can attempt to "solve" them on and off for months, and I have found that sort of thing to be quite useful. However, you are still probably spending at most half an hour a day trying to play those, while the rest of the time is spent tackling a bunch of other skills which eventually feed into this one. So you're not tackling the actual Chopin ballade, but you're attempting individual parts essentially as "exercises".
The relationship of mathematics with music is something which I've often thought about. They share a superficial similarity, with note values and durations etc., but that is just elementary arithmetic such as fractions. If you can do basic mental calculations and can for example add 1/3+1/4 within a second (which isn't really a hard skill to develop), it helps with learning how to read rhythm faster. However, this is still elementary school math. But at the same time, I've seen that people who are naturally good at mathematics tend to like music more, and you can often quickly get across musical ideas even if they've never heard before. Which leads me to think that there is some transfer between the sort of quick mental manipulations, rotations, visualization, etc. you need to do in mathematics (at a college level, at least), and observing patterns and teasing apart the underlying structure behind a piece of music.
This is one of the things I have thought about in my quest for the fastest way to progress at the piano. Many teachers are very confident that what they do is nearly ideal for students, yet they disregard situations such as these where the same students progress markedly faster. I find that the same thing happens with other fields. I think these kinds of observations can help one go behind the process, because you wonder that since such a rate of learning is demonstrably possible, why can't you apply it to other things? And from there you can create a kind of bridge to apply that insight into actual teaching or studying.
One of those insights for me was the effectiveness of my study normally vs before the exams (which was massively different), so I tried channeling it by telling myself that I needed to get something learned today. The effectiveness, of course, depends on how much you can actually believe that.
I think the process I used was to attempt to play difficult pieces, and let the problems simmer in the back of my mind by touching upon them and attempting them every so often. After a few months, I would realized that my mind had finally figured out the solutions, and I was able to actually execute what I wanted to much better than before. I've given a number of analogies for this in the past, but this process is something which step-by-step learning simply does not allow to happen, and I think it has been instrumental in my case in driving significant improvement.
You may be right. I am concerned because I've realized that my memory for sound doesn't appear to be as strong as it once was. I mean, it's still pretty good, but I can remember songs which I listened to when I was 8 years old, which are just permanently imprinted in memory, and I can hear them in my head about as clearly as a recording. I do remember the newer pieces I listen to, but I need to refresh my memory or else the vividness of the sound tends to dull over time.
I really like this Feynman video on the topic.
I found it interesting that the maths teacher I taught actually find benefit visualizing piano in terms of mathematics. For me it seemed interesting but certainly not something I would obsess over. He however used it to good effect and could deal with syncopation in a manner which his mind could contain.
How to make your mental calculations in score reading more efficient it is something that pretty much goes on forever. It seems though that once your mind has become more efficient at reading it does not forget it very easily.
When I studied at school and university I would always think that exams where next week. It helped put me in a urgent working mindset and I think it was probably one of the best lessons I took from my education. Time really is short and we are naturally quite lazy creatures so we should push ourselves to achieve if we really desire something, we shouldn't be so comfortable all the time.
There is that idea of "post practice improvement" which I think plays an important role in practice habits when dealing with tough peices. There is no point repeating something over and over again where it might be a good idea to let new ideas mull over in your mind for a while. You can still think about the patterns and then periodically go back to test them out again and reenforce them but you do not force the improvement because it is being evasive and doing such would waste time. This is why it is good when you have learned a large new part of a piece to stop and let it setting in your mind, go do something else and come back to it periodically. Once you feel it has settled as much as it can go ahead and apply more work to it.
I make it a habit not to worry about things you cannot change or which doesn't have any information which will benefit you now and in the future. I have adults ask me if it really is too late to learn the piano because they feel it is so difficult. It seems to be drummed in that once you age to a certain point just give up trying to learn new tricks, "You can't teach an old dog new tricks" as the saying goes. I feel this is just bad philosophy and even if there is scientific evidence that proves the brain slows down we really don't know the brain that well and we shouldn't restructure our approach based on ideas which are make us think that we shouldn't try because it is too late.
Topic: Neurobiological effects of piano playing 