ANALYSING PRACTICE BEHAVIOUR AND COGNITION: THE METHOD OF NOTE-TIME PLAYING PATH.

Two impediments to the study of performance and practice processing are: the limited use of available research methods, and the untapped access to fast, reliable computer software. This paper describes how a new method of analysing the playing and practicing process, the Note-Time Playing Path (NTPP), can provide both a high degree of detail and also use freely available audio editing software. Sound recordings of practice sessions and performances are transferred into audio analysis software. Musical events, such as note-onset times of pitches, are labelled sequentially with a note number. The labels and their corresponding timings are then exported into a spreadsheet, with timings converted into appropriate units and graphed as a scatterplot. This NTPP visually displays the time (y-axis) at which each note (sequential note number in original piece on x-axis) wa