Conversations about Learning Music

I’ve been having a lot of conversations recently about how people go about learning music: within Rainbow Voices, with other conductors I’ve been mentoring, and then just chatting with friends at the recent LABBS Convention. One of the latter conversations brought a key theme into focus in a way that helpfully organises various other interesting ideas people had shared.

My friend Mick Dargan was commenting on a previous blog post of mine where I made the point that people aren’t just empty vessels that you can pour the learning tracks into and then they know the music. He said that he could have the tracks on in the background for hours and still not know his part: he can’t learn by just passively listening, that is, he has to do.

And that experience encapsulates why it matters to think not just about learning materials we have, but also what we do with them. Passive, in the background listening does have useful roles, especially if you are listening to the full mix of the tracks, or an actual performance of the piece. It helps internalise things like harmonic structure and groove, so that when you come to learn your part, you understand how it fits into the whole.

But it isn’t the same as learning your part. For that, just having the tracks on repeat play is probably the least efficient way of going about things. The more familiar the music becomes in general, the more your mind wanders as you listen, giving diminishing returns on actual learning.

So, here is a collection of things people have said they do to create a more active learning experience:

• Write out the lyrics. This is a popular one, and very effective. You create a visual memory at the same time as processing all the lyrics through your brain in the act of writing. It doesn’t directly teach you the music, but if you have also been listening, your brain recalls a lot of what you have heard as you do it and connects it with the words.
• Sketch the contour of your part. Once you’ve written out the lyrics, drawing squiggles above or below them as you listen to your part to indicate where your part goes up and down makes you actively think about what it does, and thereby creates a record you can refer back to as you try to remember. Someone else couldn’t learn your part from this, but it will help you remember it. (This is basically the origin of musical notation btw.)
• Act out the contour of your part. It’s like the previous one, but instead of doing it on paper, you gesture in the air. This doesn’t create anything you can refer back to of course but for kinaesthetic learners it is really helpful. It also recreates the kinds of gestures you’ll have seen when being taught things by ear, and helps you internalise them for yourself.
• Call-and-response. This is a classic learning technique for in-person singing, which you can recreate at home without having to sit through everyone else’s parts between hearing yours. Basically, listen to a small chunk of you part track, then stop the recording and sing it back. Repeat a few times until you are confident, then move onto the next chunk. If you use an app that has a loop function, this gets even easier.
• Identify patterns. Go through your music (leading with ear or eye, depending on which suits you better) and mark up your sheet music with (a) all the patterns that repeat, and (b) all the patterns that nearly repeat but don’t quite. This is a really useful memory aid as it helps you sort out bits you might otherwise get muddled up.

Having mentioned the loop function in some apps, it’s also worth mentioning changing the speed. If you have fast music to learn, slowing it down gives your brain time to process it properly. If you have music mostly learned and want to challenge yourself, speeding it up makes your brain work harder. Music Speed Changer is the app I use for this, but others are available.

Anyway, please keep having interesting conversations about music-learning. It’s easy to think that what is obvious to you is obvious to everyone, but actually once you start exchanging ideas you hear about lots of approaches you’d never thought of, some of which turn out to be really productive for you.