Entries by Andrew

Another 15 Ways to Promote your Studio

Another 15 Ways to Promote your Studio 1) Create a niche market. Most people specialize in beginners and then everybody else. How about specializing in duets? I have noticed a significant increase in two piano and piano duo playing in the past few years. Piano ensemble work has a lot of challenges for the performer […]

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Thoughts from Behind the Keyboard #1

Earlier this year, just before Easter, I effectively lost the use of my left hand due to arthritis. I had surgery to restore some functionality and while the surgery went fine, the infection which followed was devastating. When I was admitted to the hospital I feared that anything which hurt this much could not stay […]

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Trace Decay vs. Interference.

Trace decay vs. interference. There are two schools of thinking regarding the cause of forgetting. The first, trace decay, came out of Ebbinghaus’s work. He showed that time was the primary cause of a loss of memory. There have been other approaches to the question of memory and forgetting. Scientists such as F. C. Barlett […]

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What is the Best Place in my House for my Piano?

My answer to this question will come shortly, but first let’s consider some issues commonly found in answering this question. It is often heard that you should not put your piano near a window. This rule of thumb was more true say in 1917 than in 2017. Windows in 1917 did not seal as tightly […]

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The Effect of Repetition on Retention

It is a common experience that repetition impacts memory. The more a passage is repeated on day 1 of practice, the better condition it is in when the next day’s work begins. But how much practice does it require to maintain “X” amount of material? How much retention is gain for each repetition? At what […]

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Ebbinghaus on List Length.

The first area of memorization Ebbinghaus looked at in his dissertation was the effect of the length of the list of non-sense syllables he learned. His first observation was that lists of 7 or fewer required just one reading to be reproducible by memory. This observation is later verified by other researchers as the usual […]

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How long will my used or new piano last?

The life expectancy of a piano is a difficult concept for most people to fully understand. With prices usually falling within the range of an automobile, most people think in terms of the life expectancy of a car, plus maybe a little. I have had people say of a 10 year old piano: “It is […]

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Hermann Ebbinghaus, An Introduction

One of the very first studies in human memory applying scientific processes was published by Hermann Ebbinghaus in 1885 with the essay Uber das Dedachtniss (Memory, A Contribution to Experimental Psychology (English translation title)). Ebbinghaus used himself as the subject in his experiments in learning lists of non-sense words (from a list of 2300 words). […]

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Man Plans and God Laughs

This old Yiddish proverb has rung especially loudly in my life of late. If you would have asked me a year ago if I would ever open another piano store I would have stared at you mutely for a minute and simply said: “NO!” I also didn’t plan on losing the use of my left […]

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