To perform reliably and confidently from memory, musicians must able to recover from mistakes and memory failures. We describe how an experienced singer (the second author) recovered from mistakes and gaps in recall as she periodically recalled the score of a piece of vocal music that she had memorized for public performance, writing out the music six times over a five-year period following the performance. Five years after the performance, the singer was still able to recall two-thirds of the piece. When she made mistakes, she recovered and went on, leaving gaps in her written recall that lengthened over time. We determined where in the piece gaps started (losses) and ended (gains), and compared them with the locations of structural beats (starts of sections and phrases) and performance cues (PCs) that the singer reported using as mental landmarks to keep track of her progress through the piece during the sung, public performance. Gains occurred on structural beats where there was a PC; losses occurred on structural beats without a PC. As the singer’s memory faded over time, she increasingly forgot phrases that did not start with a PC and recovered at the starts of phrases that did. Our study shows how PCs enable musicians to recover from memory failures.

为了从记忆中可靠而自信地演奏，音乐家必须能够从错误和记忆失败中恢复过来。我们描述了一位经验丰富的歌手（第二作者）如何从回忆中的错误和空白中恢复过来，因为她定期回忆她为公开表演而背诵的一段声乐的乐谱，并在五年内写出六次音乐跟随表演。表演五年后，这位歌手仍然能够回忆起作品的三分之二。当她犯错时，她恢复并继续前进，在她的书面回忆中留下了随着时间的推移而延长的空白。我们确定了片断开始（损失）和结束（获得）的位置，并将它们与结构的位置进行了比较。节拍（部分和乐句的开始）和表演线索（PC），歌手报告将其用作心理标志，以在演唱和公开表演期间跟踪她在作品中的进度。收益发生在有 PC 的结构性节拍上；损失发生在没有 PC 的结构节拍上。随着时间的推移，这位歌手的记忆力逐渐消退，她越来越多地忘记了不是以 PC 开头的乐句，并在出现的乐句开始时恢复。我们的研究展示了 PC 如何让音乐家从内存故障中恢复过来。