Ed Potter's "musical stammer":

I don't claim to have the answer to this intriguing problem, but it does
occur to me that piano music involves reading multiple lines on multiple
staves, whereas music for the tuba and most percussion is one line only.
This suggests the possibility of some sort of perceptual or neural
processing failure to integrate several concurrent strands of incoming
information into a single output stream, so that the conflicts between
what Ed's brain "knows" should be happening and its own inability to handle
simultaneous streams of information result in this repetitive "stammering".
If this thought is anywhere near the right direction, I have no idea as to
what could be done about it.  I can only suggest that Ed avoids playing the
organ or the drum kit, so that he doesn't have the problem of adding his
feet to everything else, and that he very definitely avoids any offers to
conduct an orchestra.  With all those staves on a full orchestral score, it
would probably take his players ten minutes to get past the first couple of
bars.

Seriously, this sounds like a most distressing problem for a music student
and I sincerely hope that Ed can find a solution to it.  Perhaps it might
be worth consulting a doctor and asking for a referral to an appropriate
specialist? Perhaps there is now a confidence problem (if Ed "anticipates"
the stammering before it actually happens) that could be approached by
hypnotherapy, for instance?

Ian Crisp
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