This article is about how novices become experts in the domain of piano playing, focusing on how they develop internalized models of other people, a form of culture in the mind. Six novice and nine junior expert college students were individually asked to practice a short piece of music; they were asked to verbalize what they thought during the exercise about the performance they were executing and how they planned to perform it after their practice sessions had been concluded. The novices seemed to have internalized a generalized ‘other’ in their mind, who commanded them to perform accurately and smoothly as goals of the exercise. The junior experts seemed to possess also a model of the audience in their mind, from the perspective of whom they could check and refine their performance. Interviews with two concert class pianists showed that they possessed not only generalized others but also specific others in their mind and could refine their performance based on these models. How experts can be creative in spite of a set of constraints posed by the culture is discussed.