Knowledgeable Listeners’ Assessments of Auditory Recordings of Music Practice

We examined differences between expert and nonexpert musicians’ assessments of recorded episodes of music practice. High school ( n = 28) and professional ( n = 26) string players listened to brief recordings of four anonymous violinists’ practice sessions (two artist-level experts and two competent high school students). As they listened, they pressed a computer key when they perceived a discrepancy between what they heard on the recording and what they would have intended (their own goals) if they had been the practicing musician. Professional musicians marked discrepancies nearly 3 times as often as did students regardless of whether they were listening to recordings of high school or expert violinists, p = .001. When participants estimated the experience levels of the performers on the recordings, professional participants were more likely than students to correctly identify expert practicers as experts, although both student participants’ and professional participants’ key-press rates were not significantly related to their estimates of the practicers’ experience levels. Our results are in keeping with the notion that professionals formulate more precise goals for practicing than do developing musicians and that student musicians may misperceive the extent of mistake making in the practice of experts.