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In Brazilian undergraduate music courses, piano students often have difficulty studying harmony. According to Anders Ericsson's General Theory of Expertise, mastery of any skill depends on the effectiveness of mental representations, mnemonic structures that aid in the rapid retrieval of information stored in long-term memory. The purpose of this research was to investigate the role of a piano student's mental representations in solving a test involving six harmony questions, all taken from a music entrance exam. The student was subjected to a think-aloud protocol during the test. His speech was transcribed and subjected to content analysis. The results showed that the student did not answer any of the questions correctly. It is believed that this occurred due to failures in his mental representations during the test.
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