The AI Piano App That Meets You Where You Are

There are perhaps few things scarier to a musician than focal dystonia. I recently had lunch with a friend who is a professional clarinetist for the San Francisco Ballet, and she mentioned she personally knows about one hundred classically trained musicians who have developed this neurological disorder!

In the sports world this is commonly referred to as the yips, and this disorder affects around 1% of professional musicians across all genres. However, 95% of those cases come from classically trained musicians. Let’s discuss why this happens, and what mitigation efforts you can be put in place so that focal dystonia never presents itself in your performance.

Focal dystonia causes a loss of voluntary motor control in extensively trained movements. The brain develops overlapping neural maps, and musicians can experience cramping, tightness, fatigue, and involuntary muscle contractions. This can make it hard to perform complex instrument movements that musicians have been practicing for years.

Focal dystonia is idiopathic, meaning that “experts can’t point to one factor that causes it.” But some risk factors have been determined. According to Medical Problems of Performing Artists:

• There are higher risks for musicians who play instruments with maximal fine motor skills…like the piano.
• Musicians with anxiety and perfectionist tendencies tend to have higher rates of focal dystonia.
• Genetics is thought to be a contributing factor.
  

Because there’s a strong association between anxiety and perfectionist tendencies and focal dystonia, we should look at the ways piano teaching and training can either contribute to or alleviate those risk factors.

Extreme Repetition

Many traditional teaching systems can encourage students to repeat certain bars and passages over and over again in order to perfect their technical skills and repertoire. But that can actually be detrimental to your fine motor skills.

Extreme, precise repetition can lead your brain to reorganize its neural connections in a process called cortical remapping. This is understood to be a major risk factor for focal dystonia. Variation is important for keeping your neural maps from overlapping.

Perfectionism

The perfectionism that many musicians are taught can directly lead to major risk factors.

• Too much internal monitoring, or being overly detail-oriented and controlling, can mess with the brain’s necessary automatic motor programs.
• Too much practice of isolating and controlling your fingers can lead to co-contraction and a stiff and overly controlled system. This actually hurts fine motor control.
• A mentality of pushing through the pain for the sake of perfection can teach the body not to warn you when it needs to do so.
• Specializing at a young age in a high-pressure environment can shape your nervous system towards narrow movement constraints.
• Perfectionism contributes to anxiety, and both “may be aggravating factors during the development of musician’s dystonia.”
  

What Can We Do?

To avoid these potential risk factors, we need musical education that reduces the repetitive, overly controlled, anxiety-inducing perfectionism that is far too prevalent in classical training. We can do this by:

• Teaching with a wide variety of music rather than hyper-repetition.
• Teaching holistic, whole arm music education rather than isolating and micromanaging your fingers.
• Reducing external pressure and listening to your body when it’s in pain or when motor control is degrading.
  

How MuseFlow Fits In‍

MuseFlow is a piano education program that encourages Flow State and sight reading through constant music variation. The system offers an alternative to the high-pressure classical training that can be healthier for your nervous system and reduce the risk factors associated with focal dystonia.

• Variety: The focus on sight reading means that you’ll be playing songs on first sight. MuseFlow generates an indefinite amount of music so you’ll always have new-to-you pieces to play. This helps your brain build flexible motor programs and strengthen generalizable coordination.
• Flow State: This is antithetical to overthinking and micromanaging. Encouraging a constant state of creative flow with MuseFlow’s gamified system will help reduce the cognitive motor supervision common with musicians with focal dystonia.
• Clear, Attainable Goals: MuseFlow sets clear, attainable goals through incremental learning and continuous music at your skill level. High-pressure perfectionism is replaced by progress-oriented practice  and positive reinforcement to create a more sustainable, low-stress improvement. There’s no incentive to push yourself past your skill level and take on more than your nervous system can handle.
  

Conclusion

If left unchecked, focal dystonia can threaten to derail musicians’ careers. So it’s worth considering how we can reduce the possible risk factors in our music education.

It’s important to note that specific training methods can’t treat focal dystonia or guarantee you won’t develop it. Some people have genetic predispositions and prior injuries that make them more vulnerable to developing the disorder than others. But by focusing your music education around variation, flow, and positive reinforcement, you can support healthier motor learning principles.

And here’s the cool thing about ditching repetitive perfectionism…it can also make learning the piano a lot more fun.

For a long time, traditional piano grading systems have been the standard for tracking a pianist’s musical progress. But what exactly do those systems track? And are there perhaps some musical elements that slip through the cracks of these longstanding institutions?

What Traditional Grading Systems Do Well

Many pianists around the world judge their progress through traditional grading systems like ABRSM, TCL, and RCM. We’ve talked about these systems at length in a previous blog post.

The exams are great at giving structure to your piano learning. You can use their concrete goals and milestones for motivation and track your progress through their standardized tests. The grades can even open doors in your music career, as these systems are recognized on an international scale.

When you take a traditional exam, you will likely be asked to play polished and memorized pieces, demonstrate technical skills like scales, arpeggios, studies/études, and test your aural abilities.

With their focus in these areas, exams can be a great way to learn how to:

• Perform rehearsed pieces under pressure
• Improve your technical skills
• Give yourself a structured piano routine
  

The traditional system rewards memorization and repetition as you polish your repertoire. But it can be found lacking in teaching musicianship.

What is Musicianship?

Musicianship is literally defined as the “knowledge, skill, and artistic sensitivity in performing music.” More specifically, it’s the art of being a musician. It’s the creative decisions you make when playing a piece. It’s the emotion you infuse into the notes. It’s the holistic music comprehension required to be a musician.

Musicianship involves the following:

• The ability to read music quickly and fluently
• A strong sense of rhythm
• The ability to adapt and improvise
• Creativity in your musical expression
• Confidence in yourself as a musician
  

Exploring and improving your musicianship is the journey of finding and honing your identity as a musician.

What Traditional Grading Systems Can Miss

One academic publication explains that for musical institutions, “teachers spent much of their time teaching technique and repertoire, which many authors suggest is only one aspect of professional musicianship… The focus ideally should be on ‘producing rounded musicians showing a high level of instrumental competence, a depth of musical understanding and a core of personal confidence that will allow them to express themselves with total commitment in any performing area.’”

As we mentioned in our blog about sight reading learning, sight reading only makes up about 10-15% of traditional exams. But sight reading is crucial to musicianship.

• It helps your ability to read, comprehend, and play music quickly.
• It enhances your holistic musical comprehension
• It raises your musical floor…so you need less practice to perfect a new song in your repertoire.
• It boosts your confidence…if you can play more music sight-unseen, you’ll be more confident when encountering songs and musical styles that are new to you.
  

The focus on improving just for the sake of grades can also create some learning gaps. The grades reward big milestone performances rather than steady, consistent learning. And the ability to choose music pieces that play to your strengths can lead to avoidance of developing certain skills.

While these exams do test a lot of elements that are important for musicians, it just doesn’t consider everything that’s needed for well-rounded musicianship.

MuseFlow and Musicianship

We here at MuseFlow believe in giving you the tools you need to build your musicianship.

• MuseFlow’s levels offer continuous, incremental learning. The challenge level and ability to change tempo allows the program to always meet you exactly where you are.
• Sight reading is foundational to MuseFlow, raising your musical floor by teaching you to read, comprehend, and perform new music on first sight.
• MuseFlow’s indefinite, algorithm-generated music and instant feedback encourages you to stay locked into Flow State.
  • One article explains that Flow State is “key to improving performance” and that studies show that “when musicians are in flow, their brains exhibit heightened activity in areas responsible for creativity and motor coordination while suppressing the prefrontal cortex, which controls self-criticism. This explains why performers in flow feel less anxious and play with more confidence.”
    

That focus on sight reading, incremental learning, and Flow State can help you build your musicianship and fill the gaps from traditional exam structures.

Conclusion

The ways we judge a musician’s skill can dictate the priorities of those musicians as they’re working to improve their craft. So while traditional exams can be really helpful tools, it’s also important that we think about the priorities in how we judge musical success and make sure that it includes a comprehensive view of musicianship.

As you go on your musical learning journey, never forget that you’re an artist!