Abstract
Skilled piano performance requires considerable movement control to accomplish the high levels of timing and force precision common among professional musicians, who acquire piano technique over decades of practice. Finger movement efficiency in particular is an important factor when pianists perform at very fast tempi. We document the finger movement kinematics of highly skilled pianists as they performed a five-finger melody at very fast tempi. A three-dimensional motion-capture system tracked the movements of finger joints, the hand, and the forearm of twelve pianists who performed on a digital piano at successively faster tempi (7–16 tones/s) until they decided to stop. Joint angle trajectories computed for all adjacent finger phalanges, the hand, and the forearm (wrist angle) indicated that the metacarpophalangeal joint contributed most to the vertical fingertip motion while the proximal and distal interphalangeal joints moved slightly opposite to the movement goal (finger extension). An efficiency measure of the combined finger joint angles corresponded to the temporal accuracy and precision of the pianists’ performances: Pianists with more efficient keystroke movements showed higher precision in timing and force measures. Keystroke efficiency and individual joint contributions remained stable across tempo conditions. Individual differences among pianists supported the view that keystroke efficiency is required for successful fast performance.
Highlights
Skilled piano performance is a highly refined and demanding human skill and requires enormous control of movement to accomplish the precise timing required of Western tonal music performance
Joint Contributions to Keystrokes To test the relationship between finger movements and acoustic goals of timing and tone intensities, we examined the interdependencies of the finger joint angles during each keystroke
The individual joint contributions remained stable across tempo conditions; only the wrist movement contributed slightly more to the fingertip motion at fast tempi than at slow tempi
Summary
Skilled piano performance is a highly refined and demanding human skill and requires enormous control of movement to accomplish the precise timing required of Western tonal music performance. Furuya and colleagues [16,17] used a data glove to examine movement covariation between finger joints of pianists who performed musical excerpts from the Classical-Romantic piano repertoire at two tempi (a normal tempo and an ‘‘as fast as possible’’ tempo). They reported no change with tempo in the observed covariance of finger joint movements, and attributed it as emerging from extensive piano practice [17]. This keystroke efficiency measure was compared with auditory measures of the music performance outcome (temporal accuracy, precision; loudness precision) in order to identify movement properties that might support successful music performance
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