The Piano-Sleep Effect

2025-04-17 · About 3 minutes long

An old note. I’m publishing a backlog of writing I’ve done. Read the first post for more context.

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2024-03-26 · Isaac Clayton

I noticed something while playing the piano a while back that I thought was pretty interesting. It has to do with how I practice and remember things.

I play piano mostly by memorization. I can sorta read sheet music: I can read and play with one hand just fine, either left or right, but I can’t read both hands at the same time. Putting them together takes practice. I can memorize music about as fast as I can learn to play it.

Here’s the cool part, which I’m calling the piano sleep effect. On any given day, I can practice as much as I want, but I will generally plateau at a certain level. When I go to sleep and wake up the next day, my yesterday’s best becomes my today’s baseline. Which is to say, if I wake up, sit down, and play the piece, I’ll usually play about as good as my best run yesterday.

This is interesting for a number of reasons. For one, it suggests that there is sort of a saturation limit for how much I can improve by practicing any given part of a song in one day. But also, if I learn one bar or 20, one song or three, all will have improved when I go to sleep and wake up.

For two, this depends on whether I practice things correctly. For example, if I learn how to play a section slowly, but with the right notes and timing, the next day I can play it fast and correctly. If I practice playing a section fast, but wrong, I won’t learn how to play it right the next day just by sleeping.

For three, this suggests that each day I should focus on: replaying what I learned yesterday for the gains on those sections, but playing them no more than that, and saturating my brain with as many new sections as possible. Focusing on playing them uniformly and correctly, especially the sections that have not been saturated yet. Across multiple songs, even.

Another tangential but related effect: if I saturate with one piece and return to a piece I know how to play, I will play that piece really well. As in I will play with an extreme amount of accuracy. I guess this could fall under warming up, but it feels more pronounced than, e.g. playing the same piece to warm up.

Of course none of this is scientific or rigorous. But if it works for me that’s all that matters. N = 1 is alright if N = you.

Getting a good night’s rest is magic for the brain. Have you seen anything similar in your life?