Optimizing Performance in Orchestral Settings: Sports Psychology in Music

In recent years, due to the rise in sports psychology and its prominence in professional leagues like the NBA and the NFL, other forms of performance/industrial-organizational psychology have also seen more development. The field of music performance psychology, however, has long been underdeveloped and ignored because of the difficult nature of its research. The long-standing stigmas of the music world have discouraged the collaboration between psychological practice and musicians, leading to a lack of knowledge and care for injuries in music performance. Due to the limited research designs that are possible in truly producing ample and consistent results for improvements in music, the methodology of sports psychology may just be the future direction more music performance psychologists should aim toward. This paper outlines the overlap between the sports and music industries while maintaining a realistic perspective on the viability of sport psychology methods’ incorporation into music performance psychology. More research that is both thorough and reliable must be done to improve the effectiveness of music psychology’s methods, but with the strong relationship between sports and music, the future seems to present optimistic results that will truly end the ancient, inaccurate ideas that exist among musicians.