I play the piano and one thing that has always bothered me is that I always seem to forget every piece or tune, after not having played it for some time. I am thinking there must be some kind of spaced repetition system for muscle memory that I can implement. Is there any chance that anybody here knows anything about this?
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As a musician, I’ve thought a lot about this myself and am not sure there is a solution.
Something about the brain causes memory deprecation along the lines of the “use it or lose it” principle.
That said, continuing to know music can help with re-learning pieces faster and sometimes I use 00-99 PAO to quickly remember tricky passages that flow in counterintuitive ways – which is often with Bach!
I don’t feel like the muscle memory disappears all that much (at least if I continue playing my instrument). But the “head” memory definitely does.
The most useful for me is to be careful memorizing the first 1-2 bars of each section (because if you can start, muscle memory can “take over”) and usually you can finish an arc, and to pay special attention to the tricky parts, the ones I found the hardest to learn or where I often blanked when learning it the first time.
Then keep them ordered (for this you can use a memory palace / spaced repetition if you like). Understanding how the music piece is built and the logic behind it is definitely useful (because the more sense it makes, the easier it will be to remember it).
For learning physical things (music, profession, dance, maybe even speaking a language) what can help build more neutral connections is to vary how you practise.
Taking piano as one theme (I play the piano a lot when I have the opportunity), you could try playing the music slower or faster than usual, staccato, starting in a random place, with hands an extra octave apart, very quietly, or even transposed into a different key (difficult!) This will force your brain to think about the original music in different ways, and help you remember the original music. Obviously this should be a small (fun) part of your practice and not the majority.
Plus yes, the spacing effect works for things like piano music, not just Anki flashcards.