Music Psy

Beethoven's 6th piano sonata (op. 10 no. 2) makes part of the demanding Op. 10 triptych. Following months of practice and having memorised it, my due performance at Sibelius Academy approached. Since one week before, I noticed my old-friend anxiety was back. As part of my preparation, I recorded myself playing in two conditions: without anyone observing me, and during an online recital for friends and colleagues. I could have played with my score, but I decided not to do so and challenge me further. During the online recital, I had a memory lapse during the recapitulation of the third movement. A new problem, certainly. Here you can observe what happened to me while playing life: Naturally, this bothered me, specially since it is such a climatic section in the sonata (it is the first time in the movement that Beethoven indicates a fortissimo, ff). I swore and laughed mentally of the accident.  I learned to things from this experience. First, when I mar...

I would like to write a series of texts about music performance anxiety (MPA) from a personal perspective, but informed by research. Besides being a music psychologist, I am a musician and MPA, and its detrimental manifestation, is not new to me. I begin this series openly sharing one time when MPA stopped me from letting go and enjoy music-making. --- It had been over a year since I last played the piano for an audience, but the recital was about to begin. My hands were cold; behind the stage I was walking back and forth, shaking my arms, forcing a natural breathing rhythm, and asking myself why did I put myself in this situation. I am not a professional musician, I was not going to be paid, and I was on holidays. I could have been playing videogames with my friends! But I was  there ,   holding the score of Beethoven’s fourth piano sonata. The whispers in the hall seized, the presenter introduced the recital dedicated to Beethoven and in charge of the Peruvian pianists Pabl...

*This entry was originally published in the Music, Mind and Technology  blog  on May 7th, 2017. Reading @kendraoudyk ‘s latest blog entry and its title (from which this title has been paraphrased) inspired me to write about something which some of you might have heard: listening to classical music can make you smarter. In this entry I intend to annihilate the unfounded believe that listening to Mozart’s music can increase our intelligence. Concretely, I am talking about the “Mozart effect” or the temporal score increase “in standardized tests assessing spatial task performance after exposure to the first movement ‘allegro con spirito’ of the Mozart sonata KV 448 for two pianos in D major” (Pietschnig, Voracek, & Formann, 2010, p. 314). My strategy will be two-fold. I will begin by describing the original study from which the media and commercial enterprises groundlessly distorted. After settling this ground, I will explain what further empirical research taught us about t...

*This entry was originally published in the Music, Mind and Technology  blog  on July 3rd, 2017. When the lonely Jyväskylän summer hits you inside your untidy studio, your mind dangerously starts wandering into regions which you have never contemplated before: learning more Finnish, raising a plant and calling it “Bob”, reading Camus’ The Pest, and, of course, starting to read a Confirmatory Factor Analysis book. Dear readers, this is the beginning of, by far, the dullest post in this MMT blog. I dare you to bear with me through this hopeless text. I recently came across with Timothy A. Brown’s Confirmatory Factor Analysis for Applied Research book (2006). We could include this title among the field of psychometrics. This brunch of psychology deals with (among many other things) analyzing questionnaires of several kinds which are used by researchers across disciplines. Just as an example from my own field, think about famous psychological inventories or tests which you might h...