Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Forum Memorisation

John Mortensen, the Cedarvillemusic guy, identifies 4 type of memory; visual, motor, aural and intellectual. I am very good at sight reading and very poor at memorisation and I have come to the conclusion that the reasons for this is due to the order in which I process information when playing the piano. I see, I play, I listen, I understand.

To those who are natural memorisers I ask, how do you process the information?

I believe that you had to start memorising from an early age?

Ian

Mortensen’s theory of memorization has been supported by others. The better you are at using all 4 types of memory, the better you are at Establishing long-term memory. There is a very good book written by Chaffin called ‘ practicing perfection: memory and piano ‘. In which a concert pianist verbalizes how she memorizes by talking out loud as she learns a new concerto

Indeed! But does how you are initially taught as a youngster, or not taught if you simply sit down and play, determine what kind of memoriser or sight-reader, and ultimately musician, you become? And are there any strategies to change this?

My teacher was a student of Dr Mortensen. Memorization begins when first learning a piece, not when you are done. Identify your weakest types of memory and focus on that those areas. Depending on muscle memory can be dangerous when it comes to performance time. These are people who are natural memorizers but I do not think this is something that needs to be learned when young.

BTW - This forum section is about anything to do with physical pianos. You might get a better response in the Pianist or Adult beginner section.

MIke

Unless someone studies the score before playing it I think everyone processes the information in that order. For example, one cannot play before one sees the score and one cannot hear before one plays it.

Thanks Mike. But nowadays I assume that most people look at active threads.

Becoming better at memorizing and becoming better at sight reading are skills that can be learned. It is not like an eye color that it is genetic and cannot be changed. Since I took piano lessons as a child, there has been a lot learned about both and how they can be improved. If you look at the book I referenced previously, memorization by even a concert pianist is a deliberate process.

There has been a lot written about both subjects. You might want to start with looking at bulletproof musician
https://bulletproofmusician.com/?s=Memorize

I play mostly by ear, although I can read music some. Reading is work, and playing by ear is just plain fun. So, I guess I'm lazy there.

That said, playing by ear is mostly visual, motor and aural memory. Not that I can play all that well, but I do have an opportunity to play in public a good bit, whether at Church or other activities/programs. The problem I have with memory is, as many times as I've played in public, I get extremely nervous and overcome with stage fright, to the point of affecting my memory receptors in my brain. Stage fright and stress can cause you to completely forget what notes to play, or even where to start, or even the song/arraignment you were planning on playing.

The only thing that helps is if I can somehow relax and calm down and focus on my playing. There have been times when I performed in public and never missed a beat or a note. On the other hand, there have been times when stress got the best of me and I messed up royally. Fortunately, most people likely didn't notice, but I certainly did.

So, there is a correlation between memory and stress, in a negative way...

Rick

I can relate Rick. I play every several times a week, and I do just fine playing with the band or in church while the congregation is singing, but I can get very nervous when I have to play solo, and usually end up making mistakes on things that I know inside & out. I watched a video once about a pianist who decided to mess up on purpose from time to time to help himself face is fear. He said it really did help, and he was able to over come it and accept that he would occasionally mess up, it's a part of life, and it doesn't mean that your performance will be totally rejected by the audience. He was able to then relax more during performances. It was an interesting concept.

Thanks dogperson but didn't find anything there which isn't obvious or particularly helpful.

Not sure about phantomfive. How to have a razorsharp mind - hmm. Ok.

I come back to my original question about the order in which you actually process the information. As a sight-reader I am visual, motor, aural and then understanding/intellectual. With a natural memoriser would it be aural, motor, visual and intellectual? And does how you are initially taught as a youngster, or not taught if you simply sit down and play, determine what kind of memoriser or sight-reader, and ultimately musician, you become? And are there any strategies to change this other than 'simple' practice?

I start knowing what it's supposed to sound like, because I've heard several recordings, always. That's how I know that I like something enough to go to the effort of learning it. Then I take the sheet music and start marking out where the phrases are.... Figure it out, play and listen, over and over, and it ends up in memory.

I'm not sure I'd call that understanding, however. That to me means going deep into the theory.....

When I first started to play the piano, I played by ear (I was 15 years old). I didn't know anything about reading music, music theory, until I started to take piano lessons. I found that having played by ear was a huge plus when I started ear training. As I progressed, I found that I memorized the pieces I was studying without wanting to. I would read through a piece and would find that I "knew" the notes after three of four times of playing it. My teacher would ask how I did it - and I didn't know. I am now 60 years old. When I approach a new piece of music, I play it very slowly, one hand at a time, then together. I still find that I have memorized the section I have been learning rather quickly. I really can't say what order it occurs - visual/aural/motor/understand. When I was in College, I had a professor in my education class that gave us a Chinese proverb to consider. "I hear and I forget ; I see and I remember; I do and I understand." Would say the last part applies to us musicians, but not the first two. Everyone learns differently.

Is there such a thing as 'natural memorisers'? I suspect that kids - and adults too - who memorise do so because they had difficulty learning to read music when they were learning. With beginners' music which contains few notes, it's a lot easier to learn to play from memory than from reading from the score, and that's the bane of many teachers, if you read the Piano Teachers Forum - often leading to students who simply never learnt to read music.

I've mentioned this before: like most students brought up on the ABRSM grade system, I never had to memorise any piece, but developed good reading skills. In fact, I never deliberately set out to memorise any piece until I started doing a regular monthly piano recital some years ago, when I decided that it would be better to play all my pieces from memory (mainly because I have no page-turner).

And that was when I discovered how time-consuming and slow the memorisation process is, and even when you think the piece is 'securely' memorised, things can still 'blank out' in the heat of the moment during performance. I remember watching a piano competition, and realised how all but one of the competitors had memory lapses here and there. Mostly small ones, and likely only noticeable to people who know the music very well. And these are pianists who've almost certainly been polishing and performing those same pieces for years.

On average, it takes me about five times as long to learn to play a piece from memory as to learn to play it from the score to the same technical & musical standard. 'Logical-sounding' pieces from the Classical era (which I can almost play by ear) take much less time, whereas composers like Bartók can take ten times longer to memorise. And I also found that it's much better to decide right from the start, before I start learning the piece, whether I'm going to memorise it. Because if so, I'll memorise while I'm learning to play the notes, section by section. Sometimes even bar by bar, and I keep looking out for patterns, groups of notes, harmonic and melodic features, key changes & modulations, regularities and irregularities that will help me to keep the music in my memory.

Nothing to do with difficulty learning to read with music. My cousin at the age of 5 could hear and play a piece just like that. And my nephew, now an accomplished guitarist had never played anything until the age of 17 and 6 years later still can't read music - he is trying to learn.


Yes it is difficult to work out how one learns and plays. Has taken me quite a while but I hope it is going to help me improve. I rely too much on motor skills.

And -JohnSprung - perhaps I am rather an odd case. With a new piece I still tend to simply sit down and play it without even looking at the title and with just a glance at the key and time signature. And for any piece up to at least intermediate level expect to be able to play it at the correct speed. This is NOT a good strategy and I do now practice hard whereas when young it meant I didn't need to practice other than playing pieces through. Am in the first year of a ten year attempt to rectify my misdemeanours!

FWIW I've always been a good memorizer . I process musical information by hearing first, then I try to understand and physically play/see the keyboard. Perhaps it is because I was first taught by my mother/aunts/grandmother without notation; they would just show me stuff directly on the piano so I could play along. This is probably why I was such a poor reader for many years.

I'm a much better reader now, but I do notice when I'm tired and focusing too much on the notes that the memorization skill can "drop out". It's probably my most easily fatigued skill (turning notation into music). I have to mentally step back from the score, so that the other musical senses kick in. It's like I'm processing them with a completely different part of the brain! Oddly enough, I find it very easy to do the reverse - turning the music into notation.

Joshua Foer wrote a book where he spent several years looking for natural memorizers. He didn't find any: those people who were considered natural memorizers used the same mnemonic tricks as everyone else (maybe more of them). They may have discovered those tricks on their own (which is why they were considered natural), without a tutor or reading a book, but ultimately it was the same thing all our brains do.

I haven't read the book so I can't comment on his findings. However this lady would certainly seem to be what I would call a natural memoriser.

Natural Memoriser

Hi. Colin
Further down in the interview, she talks about the difficulties of memorizing Chopin and the steps she takes. further on in the article she discusses about tactile and auditory part of memorization. I would find her not to be a natural memorizer, but just someone who systematically thought of a process and uses it