Psychology

Caroline Palmer

Memory and music

Bronwyn Chester | Ever wonder how a concert pianist manages to memorize the notes, rhythm, dynamics and changes in speed of the many pieces in her repertoire? Caroline Palmer does. In fact, the newly hired Canada Research Chair in cognitave Neuropsychology of Performance was curious enough about memory and music that, as an undergraduate, she switched from piano performance to psychology and statistics.

Owen Egan

That was back in the late seventies, when Palmer was studying at the Conservatory of Michigan, part of Michigan State University. "I got interested in knowing why it was easier for me to learn and remember some pieces and not others," says Palmer, sitting in her new office, still in a state of renovation, high in the Stewart Biology Building. "So, I took a few psychology courses."

Palmer recalls that music by Bach, for instance, came more easily than Chopin. "I could remember the sequences Bach used over and over again. Also, his music fit the size of my hands," she says, explaining that motor ability is an important component of learning and memorizing music, especially in novice players.

In fact, in one her studies conducted at Ohio State University, where Palmer worked for 15 years before coming to McGill last June, Palmer found advanced pianists had no difficulty transferring the "mental plans" they had used in music they had practiced many times to a completely new piece, "when the same conceptual relations [type of music] were retained." In other words, the motor requirements of playing a new piece did not hinder the pianist.

The novice child player, on the other hand, after practicing a particular piece, could only transfer what she had learned to sequences of the new music when the motor and conceptual dimensions were identical.

In fact, continues Palmer, the advanced player can play melody with one hand and then the other with little difficulty. For a child, however, "changing hands is like learning a new melody."

Palmer has worked with children as young as 10 months. She has shown, for instance, that babies can remember a piece of music and discern between two different performances of the same piece.

She has also shown that established pianists don't have to hear the music they're playing in order to memorize it, although they do better when they can hear themselves. If, however, as children, they had lost their hearing, it would be much harder. All of which means that if Beethoven had lost his hearing as a child, he would have had a harder time composing, says Palmer.

In collaboration with the Faculty of Music, Palmer is studying the brain activity involved in the "planning" of piano playing. With reflective markers attached to their fingers, the performers are filmed by 14 cameras. Light bounces off the markers "and we can see at what point the pianist begins planning the next sequence," say Palmer, explaining that a computer marks the predictions based on short-term memory.

"In other words, we're reconstructing performance in a 3-D space. The technology allows you to construct a view of human movement as if the instrument wasn't there."

The applications of Palmer's research run from the areas of linguistics and neurology to artificial intelligence, as well as music and psychology. In the area of artificial intelligence, for instance, understanding and putting into numeric form the processes used by the brain to understand and repeat music has applications for the synchronizing of computers with humans, says Palmer.

As for her own music, now that Palmer's piano is out of storage, she's back at the keyboard to play Dave Brubeck and folk music, as well as J.S. Bach.