As every guitarist knows, a thousand repetitions doesn’t always guarantee results. How much do we really know about musical practice?

For this double feature, we met with two experts who helped us shed light on the mysteries of practice, performance, and motor learning.

We sat down with Dr. Pietro Mazzoni, director of the Motor Performance Laboratory at Columbia University, for a fascinating discussion of the science behind motor learning.

And with Juillard’s Dr. Noa Kageyama, the famed conservatory’s in-house expert on performance psychology and optimal practice habits, we learned about what you can do to objectively assess your strengths and weaknesses, and focus practice efforts accordingly.

The Science of Practice includes:

• One-hour interview on motor learning with Dr. Mazzoni
• One-hour interview on performance and practice with Dr. Kageyama
• Audio-only versions of both interviews (MP3 format) for convenient podcast-style offline listening
• “Research Notes” PDFs for each interview with research summaries organized by topic + extensive resource lists (48 pages total)