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Playing the piano can be very complicated. With some songs having a single quarter beat at 130 beats per minute (bpm), you can find yourself having difficulty playing quickly enough to catch the beat; that is unless you don't care about hitting the correct keys. When learning to play songs I usually learn to play very slowly with a quarter beat at about 40 bpm. This is incredibly slow which can also get a bit annoying going through a song like that, but it is important to play the correct keys at the right time slowly or you will have a very difficult time doing it faster. This relates to Fitt's Law which states that there is an inverse relationship between the difficulty of a task and the speed at which it can be performed. When the task is very difficult like playing a symphony at 100 bpm, the accuracy is quite low. However, if you start learning the song slow and slowly (adding 2 or 3 bpm after every try), you can make the task easier on yourself. The more you play the song the easier it becomes to prepare your body for the movements and you know where your fingers need to move to and how to play them together which means that you can increase the speed without compromising the accuracy. Playing the piano requires both spatial and temporal accuracy; it is not only about getting to the right space and hitting the correct key, but also about being on time and being with the beat. In my experience, mastering the temporal speed and accuracy has been more difficult. Without a metronome I can easily get off time and I have to remember to bring myself back. I also can over or underestimate the time it will take me to move to different areas of the keyboard, so repetition has taught me to be able to predict that and time my movements precisely.

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I have always been a pretty fast typer.  In 3rd grade we would do a program called type2learn which helped us learn typing techniques and speed and memorize where the keys are.  It was always pretty easy for me and I would finish my program before most of the class.  Typing on a keyboard is very similar to playing the piano.  Both require finger dexterity and some arm movement (but it is primarily fingers).  Playing the piano requires precise aiming as does typing.  You have to find the correct key and hit it to type the correct word, but you also want to be able to type fast.  No one wants to take 5 minutes to type one sentence.
I learned to play the piano before I learned how to type. I started playing piano when I was 7 years old and didn't start these typing programs until I was 8. Playing the piano allowed me to learn techniques and skills required for typing on a keyboard. There was a positive transfer of learning that occurred when I went from piano to typing because the same primary muscle groups were being used and the tasks had very similar components.  Positive transfer learning is the gain in proficiency of one skill from the practice of another similar skill. To this day I am a very quick typer and I don't have to look at the keyboard much to type accurately. I accredit this to my time spent playing the piano and learning to move quickly with my fingers and developing good spatial skills for distances between keys to move to the correct placement.

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Practice isn't always the most fun. Especially when the task you are practicing gets frustratingly difficult. This is why I like to practice piano for about 30 mintutes and then take a break for a few hours and come back and do 30 minutes again, but when I came back the next time I worked on a differnet part of the piece. Then I give myself a day or two, sometimes even a week, in between my next practice session. I spread out my practicing so that I can keep my mind clear and not get frustrated or tired or wear out my fingers, but I also have better learning. When i came back I would look at differnet parts of the piece or put sections together, or I would work on one hand at a time. When I spread out the practice I am able to improve my learning, retention and performance. This is an example of variability of practice which is the use of random practice or varied practice for more effective schema construction compared to constant blocked practice. Schema construction is a plan or set of rules that call for the player to pull unique parts or plans to learn and remember the sequence. In blocked learning or constant practice, this isn't necessary because you are just repeating the same thing rather than getting thrown into random parts of the song. After playing these songs for little amounts of time every day, I can now go back and play the same piece a year later (for the most part) because I have stronger retention. I do this a lot now when I come home from school for winter break I am able to play claire de lune or the moonlight sonata even after not touching it for 4 months because I had variability in my practice schedule for a very long time.

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Luckily for musicians, there are a lot of patterns in music. Miller's magic number states that only 7 +/- 2 items of information can be kept in the short term memory at a time. This can be problematic considering pieces of music have many more than 5 or 9 items to be memorized. However, to combat this issue when first learning music, I have used chunking. There are identifiable patterns in the music such as patterns E, C, G, A, B, E, C, E, C, G, A, B, E, C and repeating a few times. This can be chunked into one item of information which would then allow for up to 8 more chunks to be made. The more I practice the piece the more I work on transferring the music into my long term memory. The long term memory seems to be able to hold an unlimited amount of information and it is more or less permanent in memory.  The process of transferring the information from short term memory into long term memory is called consolidation.

I spent about 3 months practicing and working on the Moonlight Sonata my sophomore year of high school and after that I would play it for fun every few weeks. I can still to this day play it on the piano without using sheet music because I have the sound and keys memorized. I know where I need to be and how long in between notes and I can play it straight from memory because I spent so much time passing it to my long term memory.

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I started attending the Music Institute of Chicago when I was 9 years old (I had taken home lessons starting when I was 7). When I had my "audition" for the music institute they decided that Milana Pavchinskaya would be the best teacher for me. She was an intimidating and unbelievable pianist, which was a bit scary for me being 10 and a bit lazy with my practicing. However, she was an incredible teacher. She could point out when I was even a millisecond off tempo or not giving the sound to a key like I should. She always gave the best verbal KP (knowledge of performance). She wouldn't just tell me that I needed to be quicker or that I needed to play louder or quiet, but she was able to make me feel the music. She would explain a story that had to do with the music that I would be trying to recreate and bring forth in the piece. She would play and demonstrate for me. And most importantly she would point out the little errors to focus on for the next try.

There were of course times she would yell at me for not practicing or spending more time on parts but she found ways to motivate and connect with me to bring me closer to the music. While I no longer attend the Music Institute, I can still hear her when I am teaching myself a song.  I can hear her telling me to be softer and keep my posture.  When my fingers are hitting the keys with the finger pads rather than the tips of my fingers I can hear her calling me out.  I now am able to identify my mistakes and correct them because her verbal feedback has stuck with me after working with her for 10 years.

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Bimanual coordination is the movement of both arms or hands are coordinated simultaneously. In piano the right hand usually caries the melody because the keys on the right side of middle octave c are higher pitched while the left side is lower. This is fortunate for me because usually the right hand has the more complex sequences and I am right hand dominant. I had to spend many years being able to perfect movements and dynamics for the left hand because it wasn't very natural for me. When playing the piano, the coordination is asymmetric because both of the hands are doing different things which makes it much harder to perform. When my right hand was getting louder and I was doing dynamics, my left hand usually followed and did the same as the right hand without me thinking about it. This was something I had to spend a lot of time on because the left hand isn't supposed to always have the same dynamics as the right hand but I had trouble pressing harder on a key on my left hand while pressing softly with my right hand at the same time. It seems like such a simple task but I had a lot of trouble with it. This is a normal reaction for asymmetric bimanual coordination. The lab we completed during week 4 showed similar results when we tried to draw a circle with the right hand and a line with the left (and vice versa). The movements try to merge and the circles become more oval shaped as do the lines. This happens when starting to learn piano pieces because our hands don't want to do the separate movements and the attractors of playing at the same sound (loud or soft) is a natural state. It takes time and practice to overcome this.

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"I am NEVER going to be able to learn this" *cries internally*

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"I am NEVER going to be able to learn this" *cries internally*

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One of the most frustrating parts of playing the piano is learning a new song. The learning in the beginning can be quite difficult because you have to figure out how to learn all of the notes for both hands simultaneously. This is the first stage of learning: cognitive. In this stage I try different strategies to learn the song. I have found that the best way for me to learn is to break up the song into sequential chunks. Then I practice the chunk with the right hand, then the left, and then I slowly put them together. Once I learn that chunk I move onto the second one and repeat. Then I put the first and second chunk together and then I move onto the third and so forth. The learning in this stage is very dramatic. The second stage of learning, associative stage, is when I start to use environmental cues, such as the metronome, and I am able to detect errors in my performance. This is usually once I am able to play through the piece with both hands but I need to work on my technique and working on the accuracy while meeting speed. This can take awhile as the technique can be difficult to master even once I know all of the notes to play. This gets especially hard when the speed gets faster and I need to make sure I am pressing each key cleanly. Lastly, the last stage is the autonomous stage where I am playing almost automatically and able to identify all the errors. This is the best stage for me as a player because I can finally play the song all the way through the way it is meant to sound which is very satisfying. In the beginning stages I always feel like I am never going to get anywhere and feel like I should give up because there is no possible way I will ever be able to move past this part of the song, but I always inevitably learn it and keep moving down the stages of learning!

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When learning to keep beat when you have notes changing from quarter to eighth or sixteenth, a metronome can be very helpful. It produced a LOUD beeping at whatever speed you set it too which can honestly be quite annoying after awhile. To be able to keep beat with the metronome we have to go through information processing. The metronome is the stimulus and first I have to identify what the stimulus is and that it is occurring. Then, in response selection I have to decide an appropriate response to the stimulus. In the case of piano this is hitting the key on the down beat with the beat of the metronome. In the third stage of information processing (response programming) I have to initiate the response. So, this sometimes takes a few seconds to get my bearrings on the beat before I can initiate the response and start playing on the beat. Sometimes I miss the beat and have to start over. The metronome can be very frustrating because it can be hard to keep up with the beat but also the sound with the sound of music can get a bit overwhelming and also make it hard to play because you are trying to focus your attention on too many things. This also goes along with theories of attention like the bottle neck theory. Only one piece of information can be processed at a time, and in the case of piano this is either the metronome or the sheet music.