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What I understood from this video is that I sucks in learning, learning speed, memorization and is better to quit the piano and look for a serious job 😅

Playing piano is just a hobby, but lessons started quite early, when I was 8y old. I always played with sheets in front of me. I wasn't even able to play small sections from memory. I was too afraid to fail. After 50 years of playing, I accidently discovered my ability to play by memory. Getting back practicing Bach's Prelude in c-minor ( BWV 847 ), it felt like a wall was crashing down. The twist is, I have to close my eyes. The moment I watch my fingers moving, I'm done 😄And now it's as if I've found a key to a hidden archive. Maybe it was just a miraculous self-healing of a dysfunction, but it feels like a breath of fresh air

I'm glad you've cleared up the misnomer, I never actually realised it was a procedural memory rather than just muscle. My problem is, after a few years of not playing, the songs that are still resident in my brain will fail my fingers every time when they can't 'remember' where to go next. These were my 'not thinking about it' tunes for every day stress relief. Any hints to retrieve that memory source?

The second video from you this morning. Beethoven’s 7th…

there is no such thing as muscle memory; proprioception maybe, and other forms of memory, and it's not in the muscle

I experience that when i'm trying to remember a section of a song that i forgot, i start playing the song in my head or humming it and by the time that section would play i usually remember it, even though i'm not a musician.

4:00 🥲

Outstanding presentation and extremely valuable information. More please. Thank you.

Your mic setting is too loud.

Oh is that why I always have to say my alphabet in my head to arrange things in alphabetical order, but I don't have to start from A? I can start from H, for example, if I'm looking for where K is

So give examples of applying procedural memory.

So is procedural memory muscle memory?

This whole video is literally just a campaign against LastPass and I love it

Serialisation is a massive part of memory.

Great video. I'd love to hear what you have to say about the psychology of ear training

Amazing, thank you so much

Please consider subscribing if you'd like to see more of my content! It would mean allot as a small channel to break through the great wall of the TH-cam algorithm :)

Again, very interesting. Still, the method of memorizing music, which I shared under one of your last videos, treats music not like a jumble of notes, but a MEANINGFUL story. Yes, it is usually takes longer to “see” a meaningful emotional story in a piece of music, but the search for it is a far more interesting and joyful experience than memorizing notes as if they were a semi-random collection or, worse, a mathematically precise craft, verified by a myriad of formulas, whose secret meaning is only known to professors of music theory, (who are so kin at torturing student of music, including those who can actually make musical magic, not just talk about it). ;)

I feel like im listening to a podcast by Shrek

It’s literally just by playing them over and over. Back in HS we memorized our marching music, 3 years later as seniors we are playing a snippet of it during class well after that section ended we just kept playing and everyone started laughing because we all remembered it

Fingering is a huge part of playing complex passages.

Unbelievable! Reach out to me.

Amazing video!! Thank you! I subscribed 🍀🍀🍀

I always called it the check point system

There is also the "grammatical" musical sense of the piece. Like an actor memorizes lines they don't actually memorize every letter or every word, they memorize the lines of dialogue as they make dramatical sense.

As a pianist, I can say that the solution, like you said, is always to use multiple memory pillars: the notes themeselves/the melody (but it is impossible to know them all out of context), the harmony (like the example you showed, which saved Rubinstein) and the movements of the hand (rotations vs rolling for instance). If you get anxiety on stage, usually, it is only one of the three pillars that will fail, so any other will save you. But this needs a lot of practice to be able to use the three pillars.

I wonder how long it takes for someone to be able to do that.

Nice video, but plain wrong. Musical memory is NOT procedural memory aka muscle memory. The proof is that many musical people can remember thousands of notes without being able to play any instrument at all. It's true that instrumentalists us so-called muscle memory to generate sequences of finger movements, but what most musicians retain in their mind is a tune, that is a sequence of sounds, and not a sequence of finger movements.

muscle memory

Very interesting video. Still, I haven't noticed either you or anyone in the comment section mentioning another important method for memorizing music, which my wife - a piano professor - teaches to all her students:: Compose a personally meaningful and emotional story that fits the piece you're playing, and then simply recall it like a movie in your head. You'll better remember the score and play far better, with greater emotional ownership of the music. (Sorry, I didn't read every comment, but it seems that few musicians use or teach this method, which is a pity.)

I'm the king of memoryslip under stress. I honestly can't perform any of the music I've played successfully at home 1000 times.

What a great video. I have often thought about the hows and whys of memory for complex actions like playing piano or sports and this matches up really well with my own observations. Also, Rachmaninoff is the greatest and thanks for highlighting him. :)

I have my first recital in a few days, and watching that pianist forget his music makes me even more nervous. Lol 😂 I know I'll fuck up royalla despite being able to play my piece in the sleep 😂

meanwhile me who literally have memorised 90% of whole of my program by muscle memory and ear... its impossible for anyone to remember notes by memorisation there is no pianist in the world that know piece by note to note to tell u whats the chord at 16th bar or whafs 286th note ... im not unique everyone remembers it by ear and myscle memory when u practice a thing 8 hrs a day for non missing days does no matter how long it is u will not forget it 😊😊😊

I’m good at remembering sheets because I suck at sightreading And I’m even better at forgetting sheets

30,000 notes in 45 minutes. That works out to nearly 10 notes per second. I don't think so.

I play by ear, which enables me to improvise. I can play with music too, and I too have sometimes got lost in the middle! I would be interested in knowing how playing by ear comes about in the brain.People ask me how I do it, and I have no idea, I just sit down and play!

2:43 I played this very song about 13 years ago and this is pretty accurate. I remember lying down on a grassy field the day of my performance and running through the whole song in my mind because it was chunked up in shorter bits that flowed from one to another.

Some memory will reside in the spinal chord.

When I practiced pieces on piano I automatically memorized without trying. They just got in there. True I didn't go far so they were short pieces, however when I play wind instruments I have to consciously memorize any piece of any length, even short. I've always suspected it might have something to do with always having to work out both hands on piano fairly mechanically, while on other instruments (generally monophonic) I'm good, perhaps too good, at sight reading. The notes go in my eyes, out the instrument, and off into the air every time. Does anyone talk about memorization abilities on different instruments for the same player? I doubt it, but it seems to be my case. :-)

I've been learning The Entertainer by Joplin for a while now. Since I'm terrible at sight reading I rely on procedural/muscle memory. Interestingly enough, I can only play the left hand strides as long as I'm playing the melody on the right hand. I completely forget how to play it otherwise

Rubenstein transcription is incorrect. He doesn't octave jump as the score leads you to believe. Its in plain sight in the video. Great arguments aside from that.

For reading music, consider 2 ways of reading :: direct mapping (note picture:physical note played) and Interval mapping (two note picture: motion to next note). I initially taught myself piano by direct mapping, and have later learned, more advanced pianists read the intervals. Reading the direct notes makes memorization an additional step (for most), whereas the intervals are already a linked learning which also caters to playing transpositions. Regardless, to be able to talk through a piece away from your instrument provides enough memory to get going. 🐧🐉

1:20 LMAO I find it ironic she literally crashes off a ledge in after this clip in the show

Interesting video on a topic dear to my heart. I'm super-curious to know where you got the 30k note figure from for Rach 3? Because I counted them (twice!) and came up with 29,217, when I was first preparing to play it. Some of the other comments have rightly pointed out that humans naturally use abstractions to make short-cuts, learning things in 'chunks'. But sometimes those chunks aren't identical, which I think is the composer's way of annoying us pianists! I even geeked-out and put the Rach 3 notes in a spreadsheet, so you can get a picture of how much physical effort is required over playing time. You don't get many breaks in the action... By comparison, I think Rach 2 clocks in at less than 20k notes. I'm playing that soon, so perhaps I'll do a re-count.

I stopped playing piano basically since 15 years old. I'm 32 now, I still have to skill but forgot most songs except for a Waltz from Chopin that I used to play for months to play for a concert and after all those years, for some reason, that song is still engrained in my memory and hands...It's weird, I play the intro and the rest of the song just follows

There are creative endeavors that not necessarily result in an artistic work. But reproductions are just reproductions, no matter if the medium is toast or burger grease, it’s just a reproduction, unless it’s remixed like in primer remixer example of Warhol.

Schoenberg is the actual example of thinking outside the box. But every madness requires a method, an artistic work needs cohesiveness and to be internally -hopefully externally too, but that isn’t a requirement- consistent.

We dont....we just like to play the song.

During my music studies, I always preferred to play from memory, which usually served me well. But l remember one performance where l was playing a difficult etude, I suddenly "blanked out". But my muscle memory kept me going and somehow l managed to land all the large chordal changes perfectly, until l could "reconnect" with the music as l had memorized it again!