From a young age, playing the piano was always something I had pride in. I would take part in piano competitions, recitals, and exams every year, enjoying the process of learning, practicing, and performing. Though I was proud of the achievements that came with this, seeing my uphill progress made me set increasingly high expectations for myself. Naturally, seeing ‘no progress’ (as my learning curve plateaued) negatively affected my self-esteem and began to skew my relationship with the piano, particularly with piano performance. Rather than being nervous, I began to feel quite anxious when performing on stage. Given my personal experiences, I knew I wanted to conduct research regarding anxiety intertwined with my two fields of interest: Psychology and Music.

My supervisor had conducted a study which looked into the effects of attention focus on amateur piano performance, and found that external attentional focus (focusing on the sound the music produces) resulted in better performance compared to internal attentional focus (focusing on the finger movements). The study concluded this difference in attentional focuses could potentially be used as a performance anxiety intervention. Thus, for my research project, I wanted to look specifically at performance anxiety within pianists and see whether a difference in attentional focus impacts performance anxiety levels. If we do find that external attentional focus leads to lower performance anxiety levels (as previous literature suggests), it may be applied to fields other than music education, for example, sports and public speaking. The interdisciplinary nature of my research project and its wide scope has been a consistent factor in motivating me through my research journey so far.

Recruiting participants

I expected participant recruitment to go smoothly, and it did… in the beginning. The participants we were looking for were quite niche – pianists with Grade 8 (ABRSM) qualification or higher. With students starting to go home for the summer holidays, I knew to keep my expectations low. My supervisor and I had agreed that we wanted to continue our study even after the 6 weeks and into the 2023-24 academic year, so there wasn’t a huge pressure on me to recruit a lot of participants over the summer. However, I still wanted at least five participants to conduct my summer research with.

With my limited graphic design skills, I created a participant recruitment poster and distributed that to various societies, individuals within my university's Music Centre, and social media. In the span of two weeks, I managed to recruit five participants, which was exactly what I had planned for! Though, closer to the study date, participants started withdrawing due to personal reasons (i.e., schedule changes). At one point, all of our participants had dropped out of the study as they weren’t able to attend on the specific date we wanted our study to take place on. It was nerve-wracking, and I often blamed myself for not doing a good enough job promoting the study. Looking back, I was quick to jump to the worst possible conclusions – there were times I was genuinely convinced we would have no participants by the end of the six weeks. However, I can now see how irrational my thought process was, and am slowly starting to learn how to actually take a step back and view things from an objective perspective.  As I continue to recruit participants, I have gotten used sudden schedule changes on the day of the study and abrupt withdrawals from participants. Learning to accept change with a clear mind and redirecting my energy back into recruiting (instead of panicking about the number of participants I have) has really helped boost my work productivity.

Conducting the study

The study has run smoothly so far. We had to do some unexpected lifting of my supervisor’s electric piano to the study venue, but other than that, the recording procedures have been great. I felt a little awkward, being the one giving instructions to the participant and running the study myself. However, I soon got used to it after getting into the flow of things.

Gathering and organising data was a lot more time-consuming than I thought it would be. We were measuring pitch errors, corrections and hesitations in participants’ performance between the two focus conditions. Starting analysis, I struggled to define a coding system for what would count as a certain categorical measure. For example, if the participant played the same note twice, I was unsure of whether to count that as only a correction (because they technically played the correct note ie., the same pitch) or also as a pitch error (because the repeated note was not in the score). However, after talking it through with my supervisor, we concluded that it would account as both a correction and pitch error. Establishing and maintaining a definition for each measure really helped make the process go by quicker, eliminating any inconsistencies and making our study more reliable. 

I have not started analysing the data as we are not done with data collection. However, I am sure going down the (scary) path of statistical analysis will pose a multitude of challenges I will face in the near future. I might regret sharing this sentiment, but I am actually quite excited to apply knowledge I have learnt through my Psychology modules to real world data! 

Final thoughts…

Going through the whole process of planning and conducting my own research project was quite tough, but extremely rewarding. I got to learn an array of things about myself, especially the ways in which I deal with change. Often times, things won't be under my control and I have understood that it is completely okay. Rather than being wary of change, I now try approach it as an opportunity to grow as a person. After all, I definitely feel that I have learnt the most about myself under stressful situations ie., during unexpected circumstances.

I am still at the beginning stages of my journey as a researcher, and am excited for what the future brings me (hopefully, more participants for this study!). I believe this project will allow me to continuously reflect on myself, further honing my qualities as a leader and a Laidlaw Scholar. 

I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Ines Jentzsch, for her continuous support throughout my research project, as well as Lord Laidlaw and the Laidlaw team for giving me this wonderful research opportunity.