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Welcome to my blog, Levitate! In this opening post, I explain my motivation for starting the blog. Read more
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The human ear and brain has a fascinating ability to process auditory signals from the physical environment and make meaning out of it. And it can also create music in the mind, detached from any external input and perception, as a purely neurological origin. In his fascinating book, Musicophilia, neurologist Oliver Sacks retells many fascinating… Read more
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“Practice in rhythms!”“Practice it staccato!”“Practice alternative interpretations!” Three mantras from three different teachers of mine. These are strategies of practicing a musical passage by playing it in a variety of modified rhythmic patterns, articulation and inflections. Not coincidentally, they are all predicated on a common idea, the concept of variability training. The aggregated wisdom of… Read more
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The beauty of playing the piano is that there are so many different tones and colors that can be coaxed out of the instrument. Depending on how we approach the keys, a passage can sound sparkly or subdued or forlorn or majestic. Different passages call for different hand motions, positions and touch. A sprightly run… Read more
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Happy 2025! To start off the new year, I am delighted to join one of my best friends, Christina Butkiewicus, whom I knew from my figure skating days, to talk about the invaluable life lessons we learned from pursuing our passions in piano and figure skating. It is so easy to get lost in the… Read more
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In the previous post, we discussed the implications of positive and negative framing for the learning process. In this post, we carry the principle of positivity over to the performance situation. To set the stage (no pun intended), let’s start with a literature review of a research paper on “choking under pressure”, before discussing how… Read more
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Since starting this blog, I have been meticulous about avoiding any language containing negative instructions and internal focuses of attention. How hypocritical would it be for me to say, “don’t use negative instructions!” We are all too familiar with negativity. Don’t rush! Don’t raise your wrist! Don’t be stiff! Not too loud! But not too… Read more
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Since starting this blog, I had spent a good deal of time expanding my knowledge of the motor learning literature and music pedagogy, and pondering on my readings inspired me to experiment with new ideas that I’d discovered along the way. Today’s post is my learning diary. Taking a brand new piece, I journal the… Read more
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The wrist is very agile at rotating freely around the axis of the forearm. Rotational motions of the wrist permeates all of piano technique, and is a very potent ingredient when appropriately combined with the other axes of the wrist’s motion—horizontal (medial/lateral) and vertical (flex/extend). Wrist rotation may be used in combination or exclusively, depending… Read more
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“Your wrist is stiff.” Such was a comment I received from a jury member at the last competition I took part in. A known but unsolved puzzle for me at the time. Now armed with motor learning theory knowledge and external focus tools in hand, I began the quest to reprogram my wrist motions. To… Read more
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External focus, imagery, autonomy, self-efficacy. Now that we’ve covered the major concepts in motor skill learning in my initial blog series, “A First Look at Motor Skills,” it is time to take a more formal look at the literature. We’ll review the OPTIMAL theory of motor learning [Wulf & Lewthwaite (2016)], a unified framework proposed… Read more
Levitate!
Imagery and focus at the piano | A (self-)exploration of motor skill learning theory for practical music making
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