Becoming a skilled musician requires many hours of practice. Musical expertise, however, is not only a matter of developing technical skills. Musicians also need to sustain attention, regulate their thoughts and actions, and deal with changing subjective states during both practice and performance. As highly trained performers, musicians provide a particularly interesting context for studying how subjective states interact with skilled performance. Insights from this research may also contribute to a broader understanding of performance in other domains of expertise.
In this line of research, we investigate subjective states during classical music practice and performance. We are particularly interested in experiences such as boredom, mind-wandering, flow, and stress and in how these states relate to musicians’ practice, performance during concerts, and satisfaction with their performance. Beyond describing these experiences, we are interested in whether attentional processes can be experimentally influenced to support music performance. Current work investigates how directing attention toward different aspects of one’s actions or their effects (e.g., through an internal versus external focus of attention) influences subjective experience and performance. More broadly, we aim to understand the interplay between subjective experience and music performance. Future work will extend this research and investigate other cognitive processes relevant to music performance, including the role of mental imagery during concerts.
