Hello, I’m Xinhao Sun, a pianist, piano teacher, and piano education researcher. Piano Motion Lab grew out of the space between athletic training, piano study, teaching practice, and research.
Movement Background
Before focusing fully on piano, I trained seriously in track and field, especially the 400 meters and 400-meter hurdles, and competed at city and provincial levels in China.
That training made me sensitive to coordination, force transfer, rhythm, and timing across the body. It also taught me that better performance is often not about using more force, but about organizing the body more intelligently and efficiently.
Questions from Piano Teaching
As I spent more time in piano performance and teaching, I saw that many students were not simply careless or under-practiced. Uneven playing, rigid sound, unnatural legato, and speed limits can be connected to wrist condition, forearm direction, body support, and overall movement habits.
Teachers often say things like “relax more,” “don’t lock the wrist,” “give this phrase direction,” or “let the sound breathe.” For students, those ideas are not always easy to understand. What kind of relaxation is useful? How should the body participate? Why does the sound change when the movement changes? These questions now sit at the center of my work.
Research Direction
I am not trying to turn piano playing into athletic training, and I do not believe music can be fully explained by movement or data. But my experience in sport, performance, and teaching has convinced me that piano playing does not happen only in the fingers. It involves the body, the ear, perception, and musical imagination together.
I am currently pursuing doctoral study in Piano Performance and Piano Pedagogy at the University of Kansas. My teaching and research focus on body coordination, movement training, and musical expression in piano performance, with Dalcroze-inspired practice as an important part of the work.
Piano Motion Lab
Piano Motion Lab aims to turn parts of piano learning that usually depend on feeling and verbal experience into learning cues that are more visible, recordable, and understandable for students.
It does not replace the teacher or try to define music through data. It is an observation window that helps students see their playing more clearly and helps teachers express hard-to-describe experience in more concrete ways.