proprioception may be key to improving piano playing?

BartK

navindra It's a legit sense that's distinguishable from the traditional 5.

OK, pet peeve alert but it really annoys me when people talk of the 5 senses because we have more like 20 but because Aristotle wrote a book over 2000 years ago everyone is still stuck with that idea. All his other ideas about nature have been debunked centuries ago except for this neat annoying factoid that we have 5 senses.

Sorry for going OT. Please carry on...

navindra

Animisha Interesting! Jumps are exactly the reason I started this topic. I'm thinking of jumps like in Gymnopédie No. 1 and so on. This is where I felt like vision and feel were inadequate.

Another interesting point here, in my learnings from Molly Gebrian, I'm trying focus less on what my body is doing and making my focus more external. It's an interesting balance to strike... obviously I do want to learn how my body should move and remove tension, at the same time, internal focus may be counterproductive... so I have to translate that into external focus.

Thank you!

BartK Wow, that's such a legit peeve... the damage this 5 senses assumption has done is unfathomable.

BartK

navindra BartK Wow, that's such a legit peeve... the damage this 5 senses assumption has done is unfathomable.

LOL! 🤣🤣 Yes, it has done unfathomable damage. We must immediately correct all biology books. 😂

navindra

BartK Yes, it has done unfathomable damage. We must immediately correct all biology books.

When you don't even have a name for a sense, it's harder to think and reason about it.

For example, people know there's a sense of hearing and so they may choose to develop echolocation skills if they want to. I have tried! More topical, you might practice absolute pitch detection.

Less exotic, you might choose to learn touch typing... something I'm actually more successful at and can seem like magic at times.

I'm a little less alarmed now that I've learned a little more about those 20+ senses. 😃

This seems more like splitting hairs... For example, vision may break down into more granular senses like color detection and shape detection. Or taste breaks down into sour, salty, etc, senses. Or there's different sorts of pain. You can surely have some fun here, but it's perhaps not that interesting from a piano perspective.

Proprioception might be the most interesting one and it's one I feel like I've neglected because I haven't thought about it much or been all that aware of it.

It's harder to make a choice to improve a skill related to a sense you didn't even realize you had.

Pallas

I work on proprioception every time I practice, with the goal of learning how to play anything without looking at my hands. When there's a jump, I practice just the gesture using practice techniques from Dr. Gebrian's book, literally just moving my hand from one position to the next without looking (or playing). It has made my playing much more solid. I can really tell when I've skipped that part of practice, because the piece is likely to fall apart during my lesson.

It's not just for jumps, either. It's for knowing how much to open or close the hand for intervals, and how to finger chords, and rotate the forearm to get the thumb under to avoid pain, and all kinds of things.

TC3

A timely topic. I'm working on this a lot lately so I can sing and play at the same time. For good mic technique, I just plain can't be looking down at my hands and the keys all the time.

The ideal would be playing with my eyes completely closed, but I'm taking baby steps in that direction. One is just keeping my head up and using peripheral vision more, with the occasional quick glance at the keys if I can do so without moving my mouth away from the mic.

Another is literally feeling my way around the keys, figuring out what my fingers are touching and how that can guide my movements. The black keys provide a particularly nice set of landmarks for that.

I'm also working on sight-reading a bit more, keeping my eyes on the music, similar to my mic practice above.

I'm also finding that when I don't know a piece very well, I'm trying to imagine the keys in my mind's eye and let that guide me. However, when I know a piece really well, I stop doing that and just hear the music, and somehow that guides me even better than trying to reduce the movements to something visible.

Great topic, and looking forward to hearing everyone's thoughts!

Pallas

TC3 The ideal would be playing with my eyes completely closed

I practiced this for a while, and it was terrific for building mental practice skills. The funny thing is, though, if I practice a lot more with eyes closed than any other way, if I happen to open my eyes, I start making mistakes! I think my brain switches to the dominant sense automatically, which for me is sight. So I had to practice several different ways to make sure I could switch deliberately.

So I would suggest practicing in short sections with eyes between the music and hands until you can do it without mistakes, then eyes on music only, then eyes closed, then eyes open looking at the keys! Not sequentially for the whole piece, but by section, irritatingly slowly enough to make as few mistakes as possible in the process.

The multisensory practice slowed things down for me at the very beginning, but using good practice hygiene (slow, as few mistakes as possible, with breaks between repetitions), it sped up learning overall because I don't end up chasing "random" mistakes around in circles later. And the piece is so solidly learned, my shorter pieces are memorizing themselves.

navindra

candela These videos are very cool, thank you.

Both of these videos stress the importance of feel or touch to playing the piano.

Josh's exercise is even consistent with the recommended method for learning touch typing -- you never look at the keyboard, you always look at the screen/sheet and use other senses to figure out where you are on the keyboard.

This is not my latest keyboard, but I don't even have the keycaps labeled these days:

With typing, you want to know where the home keys are. With piano, you orient yourself with the 2-3 black key pattern.

I'm going to try to learn simple new pieces using Josh's method... it's actually quite fun to do.

TC3 One is just keeping my head up and using peripheral vision more

That's a great point, even if you can't train proprioception to get you 100% there, it's still useful to leverage this sense to get 95% there and then use a second sense like feel or peripheral vision to land on target.

TC3

Pallas Yes! I actually encountered this recently. I was working on an etude and keeping my eyes on the music, eventually getting to where I could play it pretty well. Then one day I sat down to play and didn't have the sheet music handy. I knew I had pretty much memorized it without meaning to (it was a short piece) and so started to play, but looking at the keys. I had no idea where I was! 😃

Pallas

TC3 I had no idea where I was! 😃

Omg, this has bitten me in the butt. I have frozen in the middle of the piece and needed to consult the music, but I hadn't practiced quickly finding my place in the music, so the piece fell apart! I was watching Tiffany Poon practicing one time, and took note that she had to actually practice looking over at the conductor. She had to build it deliberately into the piece, just like reaching for a jump!

This might seem obvious to someone who's much smarter than me. 🤣 The more I learn, the more I realize piano is an iceberg, and what you see someone doing while playing is just the tip of whatever they practiced to get there. I think I've had to discard more flawed knowledge than I've had to learn at this point.

candela

navindra Do many piano teachers even recognize the importance of proprioception or explicitly teach this as a skill? I haven't read a single word about it in my Alfred's All-In-One Course book.

Some mention the importance of sense and touch early on. Obviously this is different from proprioception, but not relying on vision could probably be a good first step to building proprioceptic awareness. Just speaking for myself, I tend to rely way too much on vision when possible, and especially when I had just started out on the piano, so I have sometimes forced myself to play without looking down. In my experience this also helps building experience and bodily awareness of how different intervals feel and how far jumps are.

Mr Faber mentions the importance of feeling the keys in the very first video accompanying the Adult Piano Adventures series. It is not very concrete applicable advice, though. Maybe he just wants the students to be aware of the concept of finding the black keys by touch from the very start?

I've also heard Josh Wright stress the importance of feeling the groups of black keys in order to keep the eyes on the sheet music. Here he's teaching a group of children about sightreading strategies:

thepianoplayer416

candela
Teachers would say people who are used to looking down at their hands as they play tend to be memorizers like myself. They have a tendency to memorize their pieces first before being able to play them. To be good at sight reading, people need to look ahead at the sheet music except for the occasional big jumps where they'd do a quick glance so they don't lose their place in the music.

lilypad

candela I like to think that I don't look at the keys overly much when I'm practicing reading, but didn't realize how much of it I do when repositioning my hands.

The "not looking at the keys" demonstration that Josh did with one of the kids intrigued me. So yesterday I tried it on a beginners piece for reading practice. Note to self - don't try it for the first time on a 4-page piece. It took me 20 minutes! I did feel a tiny bit of improvement just by the end of that long session. I think practicing reading that way may come in particularly handy for me. I have a lot more trouble with short interval moves such as a 4th than I do with multi-octave jumps.

Ithaca

Pallas This might seem obvious to someone who's much smarter than me.

It’s obvious to people who’ve had to play in a school band; most of whom I’m sure weren’t as smart as you. Experience, not IQ points. 🙂

My kids are kind of rolling their eyes about having to be in band, but I told them they have to do it for a year before they hit high school, precisely so they can learn how to juggle playing, watching the conductor, and hearing the other instruments as they come in. It’s good executive function and listening practice.

Stub

navindra I've gathered at this point that proprioception is a key skill to develop to improve my piano playing.

Absolutely. I think of proprioception as coming in two flavorws: the first, and probably most important, is 'close in' as in knowing where your hand/fingers are going within a range of, for example, an octave or two. Second is large jumps. Large jumps will often require looking at your hands to make the leap. Most teachers will say this is fine. The challenge is finding your way back to the score, which can be practiced. After much practice of a piece, you often don't have to explicitly look at your hands for the leaps, but you are probably still using some peripheral vision.

Close in proprioception, for me, is the more important kind and for the most part comes with time and practice. I find it helps immensely in the early stages of learning a piece, when my brain is busy reading the score and keeping time. If I have to look at my hands to find a note or interval, it really slows things down. Acquiring proprioception has been a gradual (and still ongoing) process for me. I have never set out to practice proprioception explicitly, but of course it gets practiced every time you sit down to work on a piece.

Pallas

Ithaca Experience, not IQ points.

Thank you!!! Whew!

thepianoplayer416

Ithaca
In my younger days I played in a school band. The teacher was the conductor. I've also played with other musicians in small ensembles without a conductor. When you have someone waving a baton, you follow along. Someone like myself who sits further back would assume the people in front would follow the conductor so it's more important to listen to other musicians and anticipate your cues. When you don't have a conductor, musicians accommodate each other. If 1 person speeded up a little bit, you follow along to keep everybody in sync.

Bellyman

Ragtime anyone? Stride piano has been a thing for a long time.

A master of this is Dick Hyman, amazing pianist. I don't think I've ever heard anyone master Fingerbreaker to the extent he has with nearly the precision.

candela

thepianoplayer416 Yes, absolutely. If someone prefers playing from memory, and this is a deliberate choice, I think it's only natural to look at the hands. But if the reason for memorisation is that they do it because they can't read and play at the same time since they have to look at their hands it may be worth asking oneself if it would be better to try to improve the ability to play without looking?

pseudonym58

Animisha
"...Playing with your eyes closed will also help, for instance scales or arpeggios...."

Playing with your eyes closed invokes a sense, apart from the visual, as to where everything is on the piano keyboard. I immediately think of Art Tatum and George Shearing, both blind (or nearly so) from birth, and yet able to do quite amazing things on the piano.

Bellyman

pseudonym58 , I have noticed a few times, on songs with a particular ending where there is something like an octave in each hand and each hand at an opposite end of the keyboard, the first times playing that, a "miss" is quite expected. But amazingly, playing it again and again, over a bit of time, hitting that exact spot quickly gets easier and more precise.

candela

lilypad I like to think that I don't look at the keys overly much when I'm practicing reading, but didn't realize how much of it I do when repositioning my hands.

I've realized this as well when forcing myself not to look. For me it's a tool, not an end in itself, to practice playing not looking at the hands all. It really make those difficulties obvious. But I honestly don't see any problem with glancing briefly at the hands while sight-reading normally if it doesn't make me lose my place in the sheet music.

When I went to school we all actually had a brief course in typing. (1 h / week for 10 weeks or so.) There were shields that could be mounted above the keys to totally block the view of the hands. I found it very efficient for learning but of course it's not something I've used since then, but I believe I still benefit from that decades later.

Cassia

Animisha Playing with your eyes closed will also help, for instance scales or arpeggios.

I never thought to practice anything with my eyes closed before, but just tried this. I’ve been working on Chopin’s Grand Polonaise brillante and at the very end, both hands play arpeggios. Each hand starts on a different note and while they make jumps at the same time, it’s not the same distance for each hand, which makes it that much more challenging to play cleanly, and I always struggle with it. I just tried playing with my eyes closed, and while I did better than I expected, it was uncomfortable. It does feel like it will help to develop greater propioception, so I’m going to start incorporating this into my practice of the piece - hopefully my accuracy improves (especially at speed).