A School of Emergent Priorities poster finds that most metronome-app minutes submitted as piano practice were not minutes at the piano, including those logged from the kitchen bench during dinner.
A household survey of metronome-app screenshots a music-teachers' association uses to rank its eisteddfod list
The minutes on the screenshot were counted as practice. The piano was in the next room. A research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities, published today, surveys 186 suburban piano households whose teachers collect a weekly metronome-app screenshot, and finds that time at the instrument is only the largest class of those minutes, not most of them.
Kitchen-bench dinner is the second-largest class. Mean weekly minutes still separate the music-teachers’ association’s 2025 eisteddfod recommendation list; the share of minutes actually spent at the piano does not. The association tabled the breakdown and kept the minutes total as the ranking input for the following year, citing comparability with prior lists.
The work sits in the School of Emergent Priorities’ longer effort to read the instruments households already keep, and to notice what those instruments record once they are asked to stand in for something else.
A ranking that cannot tell dinner from practice is still a ranking. Comparability with last year’s list is a reason to keep a figure, not a reason to believe it.
— Dr Lindiwe Achterberg, Lecturer
Households classified each week’s screenshot the Sunday after it went to the teacher, against four activity classes locked before the term began. The association’s published 2025 list was treated as the ranking those minutes had already produced. Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist, Director of the Master of Priority Studies, said the finding “lands where a priority acquires a number well before anyone agrees what the number is of.”
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.bk7ajl.