What Can Playing a Few Bars with Eyes Closed Actually Test?

The value of playing a few bars with your eyes closed is not to prove that your hands no longer need looking at. It is to remove one source of information briefly and see whether the others can sustain the music. Contact with the keys provides tactile information, the felt position of the hand and arm helps estimate distance, and sound continually reports whether the expected note arrived. Piano-movement research links key-contact feedback with timing accuracy and predictive error processing, but those experiments do not show that eyes-closed practice necessarily makes every adult learn faster.

A useful test is a familiar four-bar arpeggiated passage that stays within a fairly stable hand position. Play it once while looking at the score and keyboard, then once slowly with your eyes closed. If the hand tightens at every shift, or a wrong note is not heard immediately, the weakness may not be “bad memory”. Keyboard distance, harmonic expectation and movement may not yet form one system. Open your eyes straight away and identify the missed distance, whether the hand moved early enough, and what note the ear had expected.

This must not become another rule. Vision helps calibrate wide leaps, while sight-reading requires the eyes to keep gathering upcoming notation. Closing the eyes for too long may also encourage a rigid hand shape used as security. A better judgement is to reduce vision briefly only in a familiar, short and safe passage, then restore it and check whether the senses correct one another. The aim is not to escape vision, but to prevent any single cue from carrying the whole performance.

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00587/full
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3179864/

To place this test inside ordinary practice, <a href="https://apps.apple.com/us/app/scoreflow/id6796205656">ScoreFlow</a&gt; can accompany a short passage: establish the coordinates from the score, look away briefly, then return to the notation and check sound against position rather than pursuing long stretches with closed eyes.