When Is the Best Time to Start Memorizing a Piece?
By Dr. Noa Kageyama, PhD of The Bulletproof Musician
Performing from memory can be a pretty liberating experience… But it can be an awfully stressful and anxiety-inducing experience too! Especially if you’ve had a memory slip – or even a near-memory slip – in the past. So you may have wondered how some folks seem to be able to memorize so much music so easily and effectively.
Well, for what it’s worth, it’s probably not as effortless as it might appear from the outside. For instance, as a kid, I never thought about memorizing music. It just kind of happened on its own. Of course, I later began to discover (and usually at the worst possible times), that my memory wasn’t nearly as reliable as I thought!
Eventually, I started being more intentional about memorizing much earlier in the learning process. But it was never very clear to me when the optimal time for starting the memorization process might be.
Like, was a month out from the performance enough? Or should it begin once the notes are learned? Or once we can play things up to tempo? Or maybe much sooner, even before we learn the notes…?
What does the research say about this? At what point during the learning process should we start memorizing a piece?
Have we misunderstood tests?
Before we explore that question, let’s take a step back to take a quick look at the literature on testing.
Because our tendency is to think of tests as an assessment tool. A necessary evil that we all have to endure, so teachers can see if we’ve learned anything. Kind of like going to the dentist to see if you’ve been brushing and flossing regularly (btw, does it really matter if we floss?).
So naturally, we have a tendency to avoid anything that feels like a test. But what if we’re wrong about tests? What if they actually serve a different role than we think?
A pair of Washington University researchers wanted to explore tests from a different perspective. They were interested in finding out if tests could actually help enhance learning, rather than just assess it.
Three study groups
So in a 2006 study (Roediger & Karpicke), researchers recruited 180 undergraduate students to read and study a short passage from the reading comprehension section of a test-prep book. Everyone was randomly assigned to one of three study groups:
The study-study-study-study (SSSS) group received four 5-minute study periods to study the passage.
The study-study-study-test (SSST) group received three study periods, and then took a practice test where they had 10 minutes to recall as much of the passage as they could.
And the study-test-test-test (STTT) group received one study period, followed by three practice tests.
And then everyone took a final test to see how much learning took place. But there was an important twist!
+Read more: "Making Mistakes on Stage? This Study Offers a Way to Correct Them."
Immediate vs. delayed recall
Half of the participants took the final test shortly after completing their last study session or practice test.
The other half of the participants didn’t take the final test right away. They were asked to come back to the lab a full week later for their test, to see how much of the material actually stuck.
And which group did the best?
Immediate recall
Well, when tested right after studying, the SSSS group did the best, recalling 83% of the passage.
The SSST group did second-best, recalling 78%.
And the STTT group did the worst, with a recall score of 71%.
So at first glance, studying more seems to lead to better recall than taking a bunch of practice tests. But the problem of course is that how much you can remember right after studying is not as important as how much you can remember days or weeks later, right?
Delayed recall
Indeed, when tested 7 days later, the participants’ performance totally flipped.
This time, the STTT group did best, recalling 61% of the passage, while the SSST group recalled 56%, and the SSSS group only recalled 40%.
So how could we apply the “test-enhanced learning” phenomenon to learning (and memorizing) music?
13 singers
British researcher Jane Ginsborg (2002) recruited 13 classically trained singers1.
They were asked to memorize a 90-second song within 2 weeks, and allowed six 15-minute practice sessions (no more than one per day) to do so. Each singer recorded their practice sessions, which were then analyzed to see which approaches led to the fastest and most secure memory.
There were several factors that separated the “fast, accurate” memorizers from the “slow, inaccurate” memorizers, but one of the main ones was…wait for it…testing! 😁
How so?
The early bird…
Essentially, the best memorizers began testing their memory much sooner, by trying to sing at least a few bars of the song from memory in their very first practice session. And this self-testing ramped up even more in their second practice session.
The worst memorizers sang almost nothing from memory in the first practice session, and didn’t really begin testing their memory until their third practice session.
The fast memorizers did make many more memory errors in their early practice sessions, but they fixed them, and made fewer and fewer errors toward the latter practice sessions.
The slow memorizers avoided errors early on by singing from the score, but they experienced more and more memory issues as they began testing themselves in the latter practice sessions. And ultimately, they ended up making a ton of errors in their final session as they tried to cram the piece into memory at the last minute.
So what’s the big takeaway?
Takeaways
Testing your memory is uncomfortable – especially early on, when the details are unclear or all jumbled up in your head. And you certainly don’t want to learn the wrong notes or miss important articulation or phrase markings either. So it’s easy to rationalize putting this kind of memory testing off until you feel like you’ve got the piece in your muscles and know the piece well.
But studies like the ones we looked at today suggest that self-quizzing is a key part of the memorization process. And if you don’t have a lot of time to prepare, it’s probably extra important to start testing yourself much sooner in the process than you might otherwise. As Ginsborg explains in her paper:
“Recall requires practice and…experts began practicing recall earlier.”
After all, at the end of the day, it’s way better to suffer through that lost feeling in the practice room than on stage!
And honestly, if we’re memorizing music the right way, it actually makes practicing much more interesting. Even fun.
Heh? How’s that now?
Memorizing can be…fun?
For much of my life, I thought memorizing meant playing a piece over and over until it stuck. If you’ve put yourself through this brute force method, you know that it’s not a lot of fun. And for me, it also made the music feel increasingly stale, such that I was completely done with the piece and couldn’t wait to move on to something new by the time it was time to perform it.
Of course, the process of memorizing music more deeply and intentionally, by coming up with meaningful performance cues for instance, or creating a “memory palace” to organize these cues can make the experience quite a creative and engaging process. One that not only makes practicing more interesting, but can help you be more deeply immersed in the music and perform more expressively when that time comes as well!
If you’d like to try a more active approach to memorization and take a piece of music through the three phases of effective memorization – encoding, consolidation, and retrieval – with step-by-step strategies from the research literature on memorization and real examples from learners, educators, and professionals, now might be the perfect time, as the official public release of the Bulletproof Memory course is now available.
References
- Ginsborg, J. (2002b). Classical Singers Learning and Memorising a New Song: An observational study. Psychology of Music, 30(1), 58–101. https://doi.org/10.1177/0305735602301007
- Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-Enhanced learning. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249–255. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01693.x
