The effect of lessons in the Alexander Technique on pianists’ posture during performance
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Alexander Technique (AT) is a somatic method often employed by musicians, including pianists, which teaches its students to become consciously aware of their own postural behavior while carrying out various tasks. Little research has been conducted as to whether, and if so, how the AT affects the posture of pianists while they are playing the piano, and quantitative measurements of their postural angles have not yet been taken. The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of an intervention consisting of 10 AT lessons on pianists’ postural angles while playing, and to find out if the effects were still evident 4 weeks later. The following postural angles were measured before and after the intervention: craniovertebral angle, head tilt, head–neck–trunk angle, trunk angle, thoracic angle, thoracolumbar angle, and lumbar angle. There were significant effects of the intervention such that the craniovertebral and head–neck–trunk angles were found to have increased, and trunk, thoracic, and thoracolumbar angles were found to have decreased both immediately post-intervention and 4 weeks later. The AT appears to be a viable method of altering postural behavior while playing the piano, as seen in an overall pattern of spinal extension.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it