ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an exhaustive review of recent psychologically interesting theories of musical functioning. It explores general approaches that have been used to make both theoretical and practical headway into understanding music performance. The chapter demonstrates how music practitioners can use these methods with scientific rigour to gain insight into areas of immediate interest to them. These are only two of the methodological obstacles that pervade the study of music performance: systematically observing musicians as they practice and perform; and asking them about their experiences. The data collected on digital pianos contains a wealth of information concerning the timing, dynamics and articulation of a given performance. Questionnaires are frequently employed in all kinds of psychological research, especially as a preliminary to some more complex experimental procedure. Some recent work suggests that a more integrated approach to the subject matter may indeed provide insights that are not only interesting to the psychologist, but useful to the music practitioner.
