Memory Slips In Music
Memorizing instrumental music note-per-note can be extremely difficult for many of us. It seems like no matter how much we practice, once in a performance situation, we can easily experience memory slips, specially in solo situations where there’s no one else to lean on. Understanding the 4 types of musical memories and how to mix them can help us minimize and even eliminate memory slips.
The 4 Types Of Music Memories
The great Dr. John Mortensen, a professor of piano at Cedarville University, has identified 4 types of music memories in this video.
They are:
Intellectual — Being able to write down musical theory details of a song (key, tempo, chord sequence, techniques, chord inversion, key modulations, actual notes, etc.)
Aural — When you can play back the music in your head. Usually limited to linear melodies.
Motor — When your hands and fingers automatically know where to go to play the music.
Visual — A mental image of the pages and staves of the score. Very rare, but some have it.
The Perfect Mix: Intellectual + Aural + Motor
The most useful mix of memories is based on Intellectual, with reinforcement from Aural and Motor. This means that we rely mostly on our knowledge of the piece (Intellectual) to keep track of our current position and then, for some difficult passages, we can replay the music in our heads (Aural) and have our hands know what to do (Motor).
We can’t rely on Visual because it is quite rare for anyone to be able to recall a musical scores visually. When advanced sight-readers use pattern matching to recognize chords, scales and techniques, it is in fact their Intellectual memory working.
Motor Memory Trap
In the safety of a practice room, it’s easy to think that through repetition, we have the trained our hands to instinctly know what to play a complete piece (Motor) without putting much thought into it. This is a trap because we forget the music as soon as we’re under pressure in front of an audience or performing for a test. This is because Motor memory cannot work on its own. It needs the structure and direction provided by the Intellectual memory.
Boosting Intellectual Memory
To truly know a piece, we have to be able to answer 2 questions at any given time: “what key I’m in?” and “what chord am I playing”. Only the Intellectual memory can provide those answers, so to truly know a piece, one has to boost their Intellectual memory of that piece.
To boost your Intellectual memory of a piece of music, try the following exercises:
Put on a recording of the piece you’re working on and try to figure out the harmonic progression (chord sequence) of a piece.
Making a “fake book” version of a song. A fake book is a minimal chord sequence and top line melody of a piece. Basically, an “elevator” version of a piece.
Practicin’s Take
The number one problem for most classical pianists is the lack of Intellectual memory — not understanding the building blocks of the music. This forces a performer to memorize every note in a score, like remembering every letter in a text instead of the words. Maximizing Intellectual memory makes it possible to quickly recover from memory slips by improvising the forgotten elements and always knowing where we are in a score.
Practicin contains tools to help you annotate a score into building blocks and boost your Intellectual memory.