A Digital Application for Structural Practice Management

Introduction

The last years I have been interested in effective practice for multiple reasons. At first, I felt a bit behind other students when coming to the conservatoire after not having lessons for five years, so I wanted to speed up my learning process. Later, there was a different reason. Since I wanted to pursue two different passions - music and IT - to keep doing both on a high level I would need to work effectively with the time I have got.

For this research I examined multiple facets of quality practice, but also combined my two passions by designing a web-application for musicians that want to improve the organisation of their musical life and their practice. Tying into the literature existing on learning and musical practice I design an app that should work for any type of musician.

As a freelance musician, it is quite important to be organised since you need to plan your own days. I already felt this during my master, since I did not have a lot of classes anymore. It seemed there was a lot more time to study, but in practice this seemed harder to realise, at least without thoughtful planning. This research helped me improve the organisation of my practice, as well as other areas of my practice.

By learning more about the process of learning I can make certain decisions more deliberately and learning becomes easier. In this research I examine necessities for learning effectively. Although these are sometimes obvious, it really pays off to invest time in improving these necessities. On the other hand, I look at what happens when actually learning music, and how to improve this process.

Although a lot of information in this research is quite sober information and might not seem very artistic to some, I find that by improving in this aspect I will actually find more time and space to focus on the more artistic aspects of music. By having an app that helps to do this and takes some of the more boring aspects of music making out of your hands, this is even more the case.

I will share information that I categorised in three chapters: necessities for learning, organisation of study sessions and effectiveness in learning music. In chapter four I will guide you along my process of designing an app, using the information that I gathered in the first three chapters. Finally, in chapter five I reflect on my personal experiences of improving my practice using the information I found on quality practice.