A new study looks at the role that working memory capacity plays in piano players’ ability to sight read a new piece of music, an important and complex skill for musicians.
Elizabeth J. Meinz of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and David Z. Hambrick of Michigan State University wanted to look at working memory capacity, the ability to keep relevant pieces of information active in your mind –the type of memory system improved by High IQ Pro® training. Pianists use working memory when they read music. They aren’t reading the notes their fingers are currently playing; they’re looking ahead to read the notes that are coming next.
For the new study, published in Psychological Science pianists were asked to sight read six pieces from a book of sight-reading tests. The book was chosen because it’s rarely used in the United States. Musicians have to do this kind of test routinely in auditions. They were given pieces with various levels of difficulty. Judges graded each pianist based on technical proficiency, musicality, and overall performance. The pianists were also asked about their piano-playing history, including how many hours per week they had practiced in each year they’d been playing, and took tests that measured their working memory capacity.
Practice was definitely important. The amount of time a person had spent practicing explained about 45 percent of the variance in sight-reading skill. But working memory capacity was important, too; when the researchers took out the effect of practice, another seven percent of variance in sight-reading skill was explained by working memory capacity. The researchers proposed that working memory capacity (the sheer amount of information that can be held in mind at once) may have a role in setting limits on what can be achieved by practice.
“Practice is absolutely important to performance,” says Meinz. “But our study does suggest that cognitive abilities, particularly working memory capacity, might limit the ultimate level of performance that could be attained.”
An implication of this is that expanding working memory capacity by training with the dual n-back (High IQ Pro®) may result in an overall long term improvement in musical performance – at least in terms of sight reading.
When not sight-reading it may also allow for more complex musical scores to be processed and learned. This will – I expect – be investigated in future studies.
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