“Little and often” is generally sensible advice, but it should not be turned into a rigid law of piano practice. The spacing effect is robust in verbal memory, while piano learning combines notation, hearing, timing and fine motor control. The length of the gap and the material being practised can both change the outcome.
One piano-learning experiment failed to find a simple advantage for greater spacing, and other music-motor studies show that practice schedules affect transfer in task-dependent ways. I therefore find it more useful to treat a break as an opportunity for the system to reorganise, rather than as a formula that guarantees improvement.
An adult learner can split an hour into shorter sessions or place another activity between them. The important test comes on returning: are the sound, rhythm and keyboard location still available? If the same mistake is merely distributed across more sessions, spacing will not repair it by itself. What matters is whether the music can be recovered more reliably after the interruption.
Sources:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5553926/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4989027/
Discover more from Geoffrey Chen
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.