We’re all familiar with the expression ‘muscle memory’ – yet what exactly is muscle memory? We pianists so often rely on this phenomenon that we should probably understand properly what it is don’t you think?
The expression muscle memory is generally used in the context of piano playing when it seems that our fingers seem able to play without our brain actually telling them which notes to play. Indeed, very often, if asked which notes we have just played played, we would struggle to consciously answer.
Lies to children
However, the fact is that our muscles don’t have a memory of their own. They simply react to the impulses sent to them from our brain. Yet if our brain can’t tell us what notes it was playing, how does that work?
The expression muscle memory is what Terry Pratchett calls a ‘Lie to children’ in his book Science of Discworld. A Lie to Children is a statement that is false, but which nevertheless leads the child’s mind towards a more accurate explanation, one that the child will only be able to appreciate if it has been primed with the lie”. Make sense yet? Probably not … so let’s look more closely at this.
Whilst we know that our muscles don’t have a memory of their own, it is true that when we are playing from ‘muscle memory’ we don’t feel that our brain is actively telling our fingers which notes to play – and this is because, in fact, it isn’t.
The real explanation
The first time I saw muscle memory explained was in Alan Rusbridger’s book ‘Play It Again: An Amateur Against the Impossible’ that I’ve already reviewed.
Basically, what we refer to as muscle memory is actually a procedural memory. Procedural memory is well and truly embedded in our brain and gives it the ability to implement a complex procedure of muscle movements in a sub conscious manner. When we repeat a piece of music often enough, what’s actually happening is that our brain is learning a procedure. It isn’t really thinking about A Flat in the right hand, F Natural in the left. It is simply memorising a procedure in an almost abstract manner.
As a result of this memorised procedure, the brain then ‘instinctively’ knows which finger to move when, how much and how quickly to move the hand etc. This is often to the point that in fact we can’t play one hand without the other (unless we spent a lot of time practising it hands separately – in which case it may remember that single handed procedure also).
However, could you imagine having to try to explain all of this to someone – hence the simple ‘lie to children’ to keep things simple!
Inherent risks in muscle memory
However, this muscle memory can also be very risky because our brain actually records an entire procedure from the first note until the last.
Have you ever noticed what happens if you’re playing something from ‘muscle memory’ and you have a slip, make a mistake or for whatever reason lose your thread? Generally you can’t simply restart from where you left off. In fact, more often than not, we might need to go right back to the beginning and start over – even if we got lost half way through.
This is simply because our brain can only run the entire procedure and simply doesn’t know how to pick it up part way through. If we learned and practiced a piece of music in sections, then we may only need to go back to the start of one of those sections. In these cases the ‘procedure’ that our brain has memorised covers individual sections rather than the entire piece.
In performance this can be deadly. Suddenly lost and obliged to go back to the beginning at worst, a good few bars at best. This will then increase already high stress levels making it even more likely for the brain’s procedural memory to get interrupted. There are stories of people simply needing to walk off stage and give up!
Make sure you have a back up
Therefore, when someone tells you to get it into your muscle memory, take this advice with a large pinch of salt. To an extent it will always happen – that is how our mind works and it will record things as procedures. However, you can supplement these with other more active types of memory. These include things like harmonic analysis, chord progressions, patterns – any number of things.
Muscle Memory and Technique
However, the less talked about aspect of muscle memory is the part I believe it has to play in learning piano technique.
Let’s think about learning to stand and to walk as a child. We use something like 600 muscles to simply take a step. Yet we have absolutely no conscious idea which ones. As children our brain had to learn how to do this. At first, we kept losing our balance, falling over, getting up again, losing our balance, having a cry! Eventually however our brain figured out exactly how to coordinate the complex muscle movements required to help us get up, walk and not fall over.
When we learn to play piano, we are trying to teach our fingers (or should I say teach our brains to make our fingers) move in new and unfamiliar ways. We’re trying to achieve extremely fine motor control, make our fingers move at speeds they have never needed to control before. We’re also learning how to carefully balance our entire shoulder, arm, elbow, forearm, wrist, hand and fingers.
We don’t do this by trying to control individual muscles. Rather our brain encapsulates different goals into different procedures.
The power of practice
This is where Practising of course comes into its own. When we’re repeating different passages, ironing out mistakes or improving things, we’re trying to get our brain to create a procedure of all of the movements we need to achieve a given result. This afterwards for us will be largely subconscious at a muscular level.
For example, when we are making our pinky play ever so slightly louder than fingers 1 and 2 for example to correctly voice a melody, we have absolutely no conscious control over the individual muscles required to do this. We need our brain to install this in our subconscious as a procedure so that our conscious thought of ‘voice the pinky’ will trigger the appropriate ‘muscle memory’. Indeed, every element of our piano technique is made up of tiny fragments of procedural memory that we then string together to achieve a whole range of musical results by manipulating hundreds of muscles. Otherwise, it would be totally impossible to, say, voice a melody in a piece that we had never played before.
The risks of bad practice
This again then can be a risky proposition. It is only by correct repetition that we will end up with a correct procedure. This is because, let’s not forget, we are talking about a procedure – and learning procedures comes from repetition. Therefore, the importance of practising correctly even when you’re just working on a two bar passage or a particular skill such as staccato playing is paramount. Each time we ‘practice’ something incorrectly, we are increasing the risk of making it permanent. So, just drilling a passage without careful, and conscious thought as to whether or not we are getting the result we want is very dangerous. We risk ‘incorrectly’ learning things in that way.
Trying to ‘unlearn’ these things is exceptionally difficult because effectively we need to over-write a procedure that our brain has firmly locked away into our subconscious and once things are in this part of our mind, finding and correcting them is exceptionally difficult.
Things to remember
So, as two main takeaways:
- Let’s not only rely on muscle memory for memorising our pieces
- Don’t simply repeat things incorrectly – let’s stop and diagnose the problem before we try afresh!
