International Symposium on Performance Science
ISBN 978-94-90306-02-1© The Author 2011, Published by the AEC
All rights reserved

Attentional foci in piano performance
Felicia P.-H. Cheng, Philipp Heiß, Michael Großbach,and Eckart Altenmüller
Institute of Music Physiology and Musicians’ Medicine, Hanover Universityof Music, Drama, and Media, Germany

Studies investigating the influence of the learner’s focus of attention suggest that, in general, directing performers’ attention to the effects of their
movements (external focus of attention) is more beneficial than directing
their attention to their own movements (internal focus of attention). It
has been shown that different attentional foci are associated with different motor control processes, and internal focus may act as interference inthe maintenance of a highly automated motor coordination. As an example of highly automated motor coordination, the present study aimed toinvestigate the effect of different attentional foci associated with expert
piano playing. To this end, both the external focus (auditory feedback)and internal focus (fingering) were manipulated in order to explore their
possible effects on piano playing. The main finding was the timing irregularity brought by manipulating the external focus (auditory feedback), but not the internal focus (motor pattern).
Keywords: attentional foci; pianist; auditory feedback; motor pattern;scale analysis

Studies investigating the influence of the performer’s focus of attention suggest that, in general, directing one’s attention to the effects of the movements(external focus) is more beneficial than directing their attention to their own
movements (internal focus) (for a review, see Wulf and Prinz 2001). It has
been shown that different attentional foci are associated with different motorcontrol processes (McNevin et al. 2002), and internal focus may act as interference in the maintenance of a highly automated motor coordination. The
beneficial effect of external focus is also supported by common-coding theory:
if an action is planned based on an external focus, the action is planned on

002

WWW.PERFORMANCESCIENCE.ORG

the basis of distal events that are more similar to this common representation.
The current study aims to examine the external and internal foci of professional pianists by manipulating the distal effect of movement (auditoryfeedback) and the movement itself (fingering). We therefore designed an experiment with variation either in internal focus or external focus. As a paradigm, we selected scale playing in highly skilled professional pianists. Here,
we expect, on one side, a high degree of automaticity and, on the other, various susceptibility to interfering variables such as variation in finger or auditory feedback.
METHOD
Participants
Twenty-five healthy professional pianists (13 men, 12 women, mean age=25.8
years) participated in this study. Twenty-four were right handed, and one wasleft handed, according to the Edinburgh inventory (Oldfield 1971).
Materials
Participants were instructed to play two octaves of C major scales (from C4 toC6) in legato-style at a tempo of 80 beats per minute with sixteenth notes(four notes per beat, inter onset interval=187.5 ms), same as in the scaleparadigm (Jabusch et al. 2004).
Procedure
Participants completed a questionnaire on music expertise and musician’s
health before the experiment started and then were informed that the taskwas to play repeatedly both upward and downward scales on a MIDI digital
piano as accurate as possible according to the metronome. There were threetypes of auditory feedback (normal, silent, and delayed feedback of 200 ms)
and there were two types of designated motor patterns (conventional fingering and new fingering). Therefore, there were six conditions in the study:
••
•
•
•
•

Normal feedback x conventional fingering
No feedback x conventional fingering
Delayed feedback x conventional fingering
Normal feedback x new fingering
No feedback x new fingering
Delayed feedback x new fingeringINTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON PERFORMANCE SCIENCE

003

Conventional fingering

New fingering
Figure 1. New fingering designed for the experiment. The fingering 1-5 refer to thumb,index, middle, ring and little finger, respectively.

The participants were allowed to try out the delayed auditory feedback
and the new fingering for five times at most. In each condition participants
had to play at least 25 times of complete upward and downward scales. Theorder of conditions was randomized, and all playing was synchronized to themetronome indicating a tempo of 80 beats per minute. In the third and sixth
conditions, the participants were explicitly instructed to synchronize the piano sound to the metronome, not the movement. The onset, offset, and thevelocity of each key depression was recorded, and video recording was madeduring the performance.
Data analysis
The analysis aimed to evaluate the evenness of scale playing. Four parameters
were analyzed: velocity of each key depression (VEL), duration of each key
depression (DUR), the inter-onset-interval between two consecutive key depressions (IOI), and the overlap between two consecutive key depressions(OVL). The last key depression of every scale was not analyzed because it wasfrequently delayed according to the pianist’s expressive playing. In each condition, the medians and the standard deviations of all four parameters foreach key were computed from at least 25 sets of upward and downward
scales, and then the median of these standard deviations were calculated toindicate the irregularity of timing and loudness of a condition. Finally, themedians of all four parameters of different conditions from 25 pianists wereanalyzed with multivariate analysis with PSAW SPSS Statistics v.18.

004

WWW.PERFORMANCESCIENCE.ORG

p<0.001 (***)

Figure 2. Mean variability of inter-onset-intervals (IOIs) under different auditory feedbacks. The blue bars represent the IOIs of upward scales and the green bars represent
the IOIs of downward scales.

RESULTS
Multivariance analysis revealed a highly significant main effect of auditory
feedback on all the variables (F18=1.93 [Pillai’s Trace], p=0.018), especiallythe effect of auditory feedback on IOIs (F2=10.68 for upward scales andF2=8.60 for downward scales, p<0.001 for both), disregarding the type offingering. Pairwise comparisons for IOIs between normal and delayed auditory feedback (p<0.001 for both upward and downward scales), between
muted and delayed auditory feedback (p=0.004 for upward scales and
p=0.022 for downward), and between normal and muted auditory feedback(p=0.103 for upward scales and p=0.07 for downward) showed that thishighly significant main effect was based on the effect of delayed feedback (seeFigure.2). There was no significant effect brought by different fingerings(F8=1.37, p=0.213), and pairwise comparisons did not show any significant
difference between two types of fingering (all p>0.05) under any kind ofauditory feedback.

INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON PERFORMANCE SCIENCE

005

DISCUSSION
Altered auditory feedback can cause different types of disruption to several
dimensions of music performance (Pfordresher 2006). The deprivation ofauditory feedback in this study had negligible influence on the evenness ofscale playing, which is in accordance with the conclusion of previous studies(Repp 1999, Pfordresher 2006). As for the delayed auditory feedback used inthis study, it created a profound effect on participants’ timing, which is also inline with the results of previous studies.
While one might reasonably think that the long-trained motor pattern forscale playing would manifest its advantage by showing much lower deviations, the result of the present study showed that professional pianists are infact very flexible in terms of motor planning and re-planning. This is the firststudy demonstrating the flexibility of motor programs in order to obtain ahierarchically higher, specific motor goal. It should be noted, however, thataltered fingerings of fragments of the C-major scale playing may be part ofdaily life pianistic literature playing.
Previous studies showed that for both expert performers and novice
learners, paying too much attention to one’s own movement instead of theeffect of movement may decrease the quality of certain well-practiced skills(Wulf and Prinz 2001). The advantage of external focus of attention is that it
facilitates self-monitored, low-level, automatic processes required to achieve
the motor control for the desired effect at a higher level, thus results in fast
movement adjustments and enhances performance and learning. This effectis especially pronounced during the performance of relatively challenging
tasks that require a greater degree of automaticity in movement control (Wulfet al. 2007). Being arguably one of the most challenging tasks, piano playing
is suitable for examining the effect of different attentional foci. In the present
study, in the fourth and sixth conditions (see Method), although the participants’ attention was directed to the internal focus while playing with an unfamiliar fingering, the auditory feedback still existed as a powerful reminderof the external focus. Therefore, it was possible for the participants to perform the task by utilizing both internal and external foci concurrently. The
utmost priority of external focus in expert musicians comes from the extensive auditory-sensorimotor training that enables musicians to have a reorganized neural network highly efficient in performing motor control over theacquainted musical instrument. This well-established, automatic co-activation of both the auditory and the motor cortical representations is likely to beon the top levels of motor control hierarchies, and only by disrupting the crucial properties (e.g. timing between action and auditory feedback) of this net-006

WWW.PERFORMANCESCIENCE.ORG

work can the motor control be disrupted. Unlike the facile adaptation to an
unfamiliar motor pattern, this automatic auditory-sensorimotor co-activation
is so robust that it cannot be easily modified according to the new associationof movement and effect of movement, as in the third and sixth conditions.
Moreover, the complete deprivation of auditory feedback in the second andfifth conditions can be regarded as tasks based solely on internal focus because of the lack of external focus. Since the performance did not deteriorate
for these conditions, it can be explained that internal focus serves at lower
levels of modules, as a prerequisite for further performance refinement.
Address for correspondence
Felicia P.-H. Cheng, Institute of Music Physiology and Musician’s Medicine, Hanover
University of Music, Drama, and Media, Emmichplatz 1, Hanover 30175, Germany;
Email: phcheng@gmail.com
ReferencesJabusch H. C., Vauth H., and Altenmüller E. (2004). Quantification of focal dystonia inpianists using scale analysis. Movement Disorders, 19, pp. 171-180.
McNevin N. H. and Wulf G. (2002). Attentional focus on supra-postural tasks affects
postural control. Human Movement Science, 21, pp. 187-202.
Oldfield R. C. (1971). The assessment and analysis of handedness: The Edinburgh inventory. Neuropsychologia, 9, pp. 77-113.
Pfordresher P. Q. (2006). Coordination of perception and action in music performance.
Advances in Cognitive Psychology, 2, pp. 183-198.
Repp B. H. (1999). Effects of auditory fedback deprivation on expressive piano performance. Music Perception, 16, pp. 409-438.
Wulf G. and Prinz W. (2001). Directing attention to movement effects enhances learning: A review. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 8, pp. 648-660.
Wulf G., Töllner T., and Shea C. H. (2007). Attentional focus effects as a function of taskdifficulty. Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 78, pp. 257-264.