[Harp-L] Mental Practice

[Chris Hofstader]

> 
> phil: That's the advantage of mental playing: perfection.
> You always practice perfect execution. In real life, the odds favor imperfect practice. But mental practice is always perfect execution.
> 
> cdh: I don’t find this to be true. The more I’ve actually practiced something, the better I get while visualizing. When I’m learning something new, I stumble in my head as much as I do with harp in hand. Whether mental repetitions would make the physical playing better or if it would make the visualizations play more accurately remains an unknown, it’s only been a few months since I first noticed the earliest of these visual experiences and they’ve evolved and gotten more accurate and complex quite rapidly, hence, I’ve not the opportunity to test this. 

I suppose I could try to learn something new and challenging for me at my skill level and go a week or so only practicing it in my head and then hear what comes out of the harp when I try to recall it for playing. I could continue my daily practice ritual on anything else I’m messing around with excepting the lone thing I’m practicing in head only. It’d be an interesting experiment but, with a sample size of one, results will be strictly anecdotal, made even less useful in that I also designed the experiment and it’s impossible to control for bias let alone blind it.

cdh: I’ve started taking lots of notes on this phenomena and am sharing with a guy up at NC State who actually works on this stuff for real and he’s intrigued. Maybe he’ll talk to a few other people who try to play an instrument with both congenital and acquired blindness about their visual experiences, if any, regarding music. We did a literature search and couldn’t find anything but I must admit, we only looked at scholar.google.com <http://scholar.google.com/> and our search hasn’t been exhaustive yet. 

Happy hacking,
cdh


HH,
cdh

>  

> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: jon kip <jon at xxxxx>
> To: harp-l <harp-l at xxxxx>
> Sent: Fri, Dec 16, 2016 4:17 pm
> Subject: Re: [Harp-L] Mental Practice
> 
> Alto Sax master, Cannonball Adderley's wife once wrote that in the later years, Cannonball did most of his practicing "in his head".
> 
> As I've been reading the discussion, I'm wondering if ANYBODY has EVER "thought played" a wrong note?
> 
> I find that an interesting concept.
> 
> 
> jk
> 
> http://jonkip.com
> 
> 
> 
>> On Dec 16, 2016, at 8:10 AM, harp-l-request at xxxxx wrote:
>> 
>> Re: mental practice
> 
> jon kip
> jon at xxxxx
> 
> 
> 
>