Keyboard Skills

When I lived in Barnsley I worked alongside a wonderful woman called Diane who once told me about a bloke she went out with who was from North Africa, and he once took her back to meet his family and it turned out they were quite a well-to-do-family but they could 't speak a word of English and Diane couldn't speak a word of Arabic and when they asked her what she did for a living (she was a secretary), she had to mime the action of typing and then there was this misunderstanding because they just somehow assumed she was telling them she was a concert pianist.

I've recently been trying to spend more time with my piano. I say "piano", what I actually mean is a battered old electronic Yamaha keyboard that's several octaves short of a full set of octaves and has an action that is nothing like that of a piano never mind a grand piano. And I've been trying to do something I never really mastered when I played the piano as a teenager, and that is to play a piece of music from start to finish from memory.

I've chosen for my experiment the Allemande from Bach's Partita No. 1. Not very difficult technically but that doesn't really matter; what matters is whether or not I can remember how to play the damn thing without having the music in front of me. And so far I've managed to get to the end of the first page (there are only two pages in total) so that's good but I am utterly mystified by how this process of memorisation actually happens. I'm convinced that you can't actually teach your memory; you just have to kind of wait for it to lodge there, and then hope that constant repetition will do the rest for you.

And then, this afternoon, I started wondering how - when you're typing - you remember where the keys on a computer keyboard are. Most of us know that the first six letters on the top row are QWERTY but we never use that knowledge whenever we're looking for a Q or a W or an E or whatever. Once we've done a fair bit of typing - regardless of whether we've ever actually learned to type or not - we just seem to know where the keys are. Muscle memory. Probably. Though I have absolutely no idea what muscle memory actually is. But it feels like muscle memory.

And these musings on typing and knowing where the keys are and how that affects the speed at which you can type - all that brought to mind a wonderful article I read this morning about how - when you are creating written content - typing is usually better than writing longhand, and the faster you can learn to type, the better.

I did the test that there's a link to in the article and I type at 50wpm. Not as fast as the ideal 60, but fast enough for what I need to be able to do.