Music, Motor Control and the Brain

Alexander Weymann In a thread on the use of 20dB cut plugs when practicing the soprano recorder, for I also play three different recorders, Claude AI came out with,

“For apartment living during your Dublin transition planning, 20dB plugs during practice sessions seems like a reasonable, moderate approach rather than a major compromise.”

The thread never mentioned Dublin, haha. I was just trying to protect my hearing.

Claude AI sometimes circles back to my struggles with Chopin’s Op 17 No 4, and seems to have a much higher opinion of my piano playing skills than I, or my teacher, have.

Alas, we have always had to read text carefully, and recognize statements that don’t quite fit. It is no different with AI. So far, the benefits from my conversations far outweigh the negatives. 

I am happy that you will be along for the ride with reading these papers! I will use the reading order proposed by your Professor Chatty, lol.

Far be it from me to criticize anyone for buying a book, no matter the price.

I buy the Kindle versions because it’s a bit easier to post excerpts, and twenty years of living in small apartments caused me to shed a lot of physical books. 

A small German company built some software to take highlighted passages and add them to an AI model, allowing for the visualization and searching of a word net. So, the approximately 25,000 highlights from twenty years of my Kindle reading became accessible to me.

I still search for ways to more easily highlight and share text from physical books, and so, I have ordered a small wand that will scan text. I haven’t received it yet.

As for conscious control while playing the piano, it is a fascinating topic of discussion. Too much conscious control is a potential threat to fluid playing. 

Even with low levels of conscious control during playing, there is still monitoring going on in the brain. I believe this is why we can detect  wrong notes. The brain is still comparing the real output of our playing, sound/pitch, to the predicted output that that is stored in the motor programs..

Someone said that performance was not the time to slip into conscious control to try to correct mistakes, for the playing can fall apart.

This issue of conscious versus unconscious control is one that I believe many musicians recognize.

When I attended an open rehearsal of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden string quartet perhaps forty years ago, Arnold Steinhardt, the first violinist of the Guarneri String Quartet, spoke of how the final passage was far too fast to be played with conscious control of his hands and fingers.

So, perhaps, that’s the rub, the tempo.  

Can a pianist, or any musician, use more conscious control when playing a slow movement than a fast movement? It’s an interesting question. What do you think? 

Is a pianist more conscious of their movements in a slower variation of the Goldbergs than a faster variation?

Alexander Weymann It stands to reason that more conscious control is possible during slow pieces. I wonder if I will find this discussed in one of the papers in the book. I hope so.

It does seem to me , though, that the nature of the piano puts tremendous demands on the conscious system, such that processing is pushed to the unconscious. I am thinking of the line in Palmer’s paper that mentions thousands of pitch events, 8-12 a second.

Other instruments, such as the violin, follow a single musical line, and cannot generate the sheer number of notes that are possible on the piano. 

A violin can sustain a single pitch for a long time with the bow, but the piano is, to use Garrick Ohlsson’s characterization, “ a box of decrescendos.” The notes are always dying away.

I think that encourages the writing of dense, difficult music, which increases the cognitive load even at a slow tempo. After all, we are grabbing notes with ten fingers. Pity the organists who add two or more notes with their feet. 

By the way, a “rub” is any obstacle that impedes the rolling of a ball in lawn bowling, a popular game in Shakespeare’s time. The line “there’s the rub” is from Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy, in case anyone doesn’t know.

I fear there are multiple rubs that limit the ability to playing consciously, not just tempo, but also complexity.

Alexander Weymann Haha, well, I am here to help! I spent forty years writing software. I am pretty good at putting systems together and debugging them.

The good news is that you have a system in the N1 that is transmitting note messages (MIDI) with velocity when you play, unlike a purely acoustic instrument.

So, you will be able to use software to analyze your accuracy in real time. You would need a few cables and perhaps an interface to a laptop.
 

With my piano, I can use something called a “USB to Host” port to plug directly into a USB C port on my MacBook Air to receive the MIDI messages.
 

You would be a good test subject, as you are an advanced player. If you’re game, I will demonstrate the software and let you decide its utility. 

I had a talk with Claude AI. I believe a post hoc analysis tool is more useful than a live analysis tool, and that approach simplifies a difficult problem. I could possibly build something myself.

It’s wonderful that you have played the Ravel piece in the style of Chabrier. I think Chabrier wrote challenging piano music, so, it might be something you’d be interested in exploring.

Alexander Weymann I asked Claude AI to work up the design of a post hoc analysis tool that would compare an actual performance, captured in MIDI, to a representation of the piece in MusicXML.

Here is the result, 

https://claude.ai/share/0c68a8eb-3983-42df-b77f-8c8b9744b1ec

Can you read it? 

The matching problem is a difficult one, especially the detection of tempo irregularities and misalignment of hands together playing. 

I am hoping to avoid having to try to write such a tool but Claude AI is excited to build it for me, lol.

One of the issues in building an analyzer is that someone has to provide what is called “ground truth.” That means, notes missed, notes rushed, misalignment of hands, etc. 
 

I think I can do this with the pieces I learn with my teacher, as that will give me input into where I played well, and where I made mistakes.

Without a teacher, I feel that ”ground truth” is on shaky ground, lol.

By the way, interpretation is outside the scope of the tool. Perhaps that is a deal breaker for advanced players, I don’t know.

Alexander Weymann  As for Chabrier, Claude AI recommended these easier pieces for me, 

Pièces pittoresques (1881), the slower movements:

• Mélancolie (No. 5) is slow and lyrical, with little technical difficulty. The challenge is tone and voicing.
• Idylle (No. 6) is gentle and pastoral, and a good place to work on shaping long lines.
• Paysage (No. 1) is moderate, with a relaxed pastoral feel.
• Sous-bois (No. 4) is light and flowing, with some quick passagework.

and said to avoid these as more difficult,

• Bourrée fantasque is his best-known solo work, but it's virtuosic, with jumps and rhythmic drive that are very hard to make convincing.
• Menuet pompeux, Improvisation, and Tourbillon are all hard.