Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Is 'passive' learning possible

Hello, I started playing piano a 3 months ago (or was it 2? I dont remember...)at the ripe old age of 21. Im not a big forum poster so before I go disappear and go train in the mountains (i might participate in the next recital, because it gets kinda lonely in the mountains .) I have a couple of questions.

Its about passive learning. I just wanted to know is it possible to just randomly play some pieces without memorizing it and just practice it mildly. will this help my piano playing? My teacher doesn't think It will, I want to know what other people think about.

Also, will listening to music will help you with sight reading? what I do is take some sheet music and listen to a performer play the piece while i will just follow along. I have a hard time keeping up since im sill using phrases such Every Good Boy Does Fine or All Cows Eat Grass to help me identify the notes. but Its quite fun to do this even if I dont understand most of it. Does doing this help me?

All the time you play you should be trying to understand where the composer's coming from so you can make it as convincing as they did.

Listening to music is always helpful. But mostly playing music is about just that - playing music. It's a physical thing. You want to learn to play football, you've got to spend a long time playing football.

Hey Keyboard...passive...
By all means keep trying....and above all else....enjoy what you are doing...whether....listen to copy what others do, or working on a piece of music. Of course studying to be smart at the keyboard is wonderful too.

If you are still having to 'know' the notes by sayings, let me help you there.

Get some exercise-cards for notes and keep drilling yourself until you can say them instantly. Maybe you can find some cards or make up some cards, also for Intervals: 1st C+C (Middle C); 2nd C+D; 3rd C+E; 4th C+F; 5th C+G; 6th C+A; C+B; 8th C+C'. Where you can picture intervals in music instantly no matter what the notes are. This is very important too.

Now if you know the treble clef notes really well, the bass notes are like a line or space name below what the treble clef line and space notes say.

Example: Second C above Middle C in treble clef is 3rd space. In the Bass Clef it is the 2nd space. Always read spaces and lines from the bottom up. You should also always read notes on the Grand Staff from the bottom up too.

I hope this will be helpful.

You might find it difficult to find recordings of music you can follow with a score, but I think it's helpful. Most important and effective is working at playing the piano, but I find that listening while following the score does help me internalize the music.

"Passive" learning is possible however I think it may apply more to the way you think about music as opposed to actually playing it.

What I mean is that when you play a piece by ear or even improvise on a score, you must *think ahead* at all times. By pasiively (or actively) listening to music, you hear the fill ins and creative runs throughout the piece. Over time you will start developing your own creative runs and fill ins/embellishments without evern thinking about it.

There is a catch. The catch is that you will eventually be able to compose beautiful scores of music.....in your mind. "The catch" is being able to transfer these musical thoughts into reality on the keyboard. that's the tough part for me anyway.

The way to do this is by simply paying constant attention to where the sounds are coming from. Constantly. Of course you will hit more wrong notes than correct ones but over time this will change as you improve.

It takes time. "Time" is defined as many many years and is forever ongoing. there is NO quick way as learning piano is something that is earned over time. You MUST pay your dues.

"I just wanted to know is it possible to just randomly play some pieces without memorizing it and just practice it mildly. will this help my piano playing? My teacher doesn't think It will, I want to know what other people think about."

Hmmm... anything you do for your music education, is something on your side. In Arnold Schoenberg's book, The Theory of Harmony, he says that the reason we study with a teacher is because it takes so long to get anywhere otherwise. I don't see anything really wrong with picking some pieces at random and giving them a whack. My experience with piano teachers is that they try to pick things that, number one, you can play and, number two, that will help you to learn step by step.

"Also, will listening to music will help you with sight reading? what I do is take some sheet music and listen to a performer play the piece while i will just follow along."

I think this is a very good thing to do. By itself, it's not enough--- only putting in the hours at the keyboard and letting your eyes and fingers and brain learn to work together is going to get you to the point where you can read and play. But, associating what you see on the page with what you hear, and the inner feeling the performer brings to it--- that is a big deal.

Someone who posts here quotes Carl Czerny (a student of Beethoven's): "Practice is the great magician, which makes the impossible not only possible, but easy."

I think of it often.

It takes some time for a music student to pick up the momentum and gather the motivation to learn to read and play. Any effort you make is helpful to you. Most helpful of all would be to acquire the habit of playing every day (even for 15 or 20 minutes) and concentrating on what the teacher is trying to show you. After that, play for fun all you want.

You don't have to memorise music if you don't want to. But what you'll find is - the more you do remember about a musical piece (or bit of music), the more it can be within you. You become very familiarised with it. And you might develop a feeling about how you would like it to sound when you play it. And when you then combine the situation of knowing what you would like to hear - along with the learned/developed/practised techniques that might allow you to play it in the way you want to hear (smooth, precise, accurate, expressive etc) ------ then this sets up a good musical pathway (aka - cliche word - 'journey').

The Every Good etc etc thing can be handy to begin with. No problem at all. But the important thing that teachers should all tell students is that this is just to start off many beginners on their pathway. In the end, the Every Good etc etc phrases will never be used later, because that method doesn't provide "immediate/direct/very-quick/automatic" connection between notes seen on a score-book and the keys of a piano. Other handy methods get taught too, including other sorts of 'reference' point on the score ------- other than the not-so-efficient E-G-B-D-F, F-A-C-E, A-C-E-G, G-B-D-F-A thing.

+1.

FYI, before you all help the poor OP out, s/he hasn't logged in for the last 12 years.

Staying optimistic is good! They may well log in again one day. Or one year. Or
... we'll keep the door open anyway. And always have a plate of fresh biscuits and fresh dairy milk for them.

If you don’t memorize a piece, the 2 ways to reproduce it is by ear or reading off sheet music.

Playing Classical pieces you’re reproducing notes written years ago. A complicated piece most people would be reading off the sheet than by ear. An easy piece with a 1 line melody the top part can be learned easily. The LH accompaniment would take more effort.

If you repeated a piece enough times, you develop muscle memory. Your hands are on autopilot while you may not be consciously memorizing each note.

This sentence has left me pondering how we all process things differently, and leaves me with a question:


If I memorize a piece, esp. in the past, I am remembering how it sounds, so "by ear". Memorizing and "ear" are synonymous for my personal experience. So if memorizing is not via the ear, how do you perceive or do memorizing?

I do that too KS. I attempt to memorise the sound.

In some discussion in another section [ThreadLink] ......... very closely related, and very relevant to this ----- memorising sounds/patterns.

Getting the essence of the music into the head/brain ----- as 'audio' memory. That especially needs to be done with music that involves very particular pitch shifting, special nuances etc etc etc.

Ideally - recordings should be done (if available - and that wasn't available a long time ago in the past). So people had to pass the music onto others by teaching and playing. So the recipients could then remember it, and learn it, and play it themselves. Or at least the essence of it.

These days, we have recording gear at least.

I don’t memorize a piece strictly by how it sounds, but add as many of my other senses as I can as part of memorizing. Is the process perfect for me? No, but whatever I do augments just the aural memory.

If I play a memorized piece, I include the other senses to the aural.

…. This ‘passive’ learning to me is about practicing away from the piano…my evolution in this area include:
1. Basic theory review the score
2. Listen to few professional recordings
3. Practice rhythms by counting out loud if this is your weakest link

By attending college music theory class this semester, it has taken my passive learning to whole new level. I recommend it if you can do it. The analysis of various scores have really expanded my awareness exponentially.

I never listened to recordings in the past, because when I started to do things with music, the Internet didn't exist and I was not able to buy music for myself (records & tape recordings back then). But I'd play or sing from the page, hear the sound, and that was what led me on. I also had a feel for some musical patterns long before learning anything about theory, and those created a map.


For memorizing, I now know that one also brings in other things such as hand gestures or whatever. Pianists tell me that when away from the score, they also picture their hand gesture at times. For me, I draw a total blank. I did not come to this in any "normal" way and am catching up.

Meanwhile my question to the pianoplayer is still up, because I wonder what s/he meant.

Very interesting comment about hand-gestures KS. The hand gestures thing could possibly a part of building up the 'brain memory' ('muscle' memory) ------ as in those pianists create their own remembered experience that includes even those gestures/postures. I know the feeling, even though I place emphasis on the music itself - the sound, sequence/movement, patterns.

I'm just going to make a generalisation hehehe ...... you know in tai-chi etc, where they try to get their body - arms, legs, everything move in some fluid connected way ---- in general that is. In piano playing ----- it might not be exactly like that, but some similarities --- as in the body attempting to prepare notes to be played in smooth ways. This is for those elegant smooth types of music. And you can see some pianists doing their body swaying, and body 'circle' work as they play heheh ..... some doing their rocking in various ways, and arm movement work etc. I can see that the technique is to get the body to be involved. Some might take it to extremes. Others less of it. Whatever works for them is fine I reckon. As long as it gets their job done.

For some pianists - the ones born with super memory - like fast speed terabyte memory - and have their brain 'wired' up/configured in some particular ways ------- that certainly helps too. And another element is coordination ability. The ability to actually pull-off the playing of many many notes with no error, or minimum error. And - regardless of how much professional practice and help and preparation they have ------ not everybody might have been born (or gifted) with the overall potential to sit down and do what full-on concert pianists do, even if they started at the same time as the concert pianist, same teacher, same practice time. Skills would still be very good of course. But I think it takes some 'special' extra 'x-factor' stuff to do certain things that for example Lang Lang and co. does.

I think this is primarily how I memorize, in addition to having the auditory memory. Of course we also have muscle memory, but from the start, I could basically see my hands in my mind's eye playing a piece on the piano. Even now, I usually rehearse like this before a lesson while I'm commuting, or before a performance, by trying to play parts of it in my mind. So while I don't have visual memory of the score, this really helps me retain pieces.