Zooming along with Route Sixteen

Borrowed from their facebook pageBorrowed from their facebook page

Wednesday evening saw me virtually heading across to the Netherlands to coach my friends RouteSixteen in preparation for the Holland Harmony Convention this spring. As with last time I worked with them on contest prep, I had intended to take a screen shot to share with you, but they turned up in costume so I didn’t so as not to give any spoilers.

Much of our work focused on the theme of continuity of sound. This is of course both a function of voice-technical and a musical matters, and I find it helpful to triangulate between the two dimensions as we work, connecting up what we are want to achieve with how, practically, to achieve it.

Gebrain* and the Inner Game

In my first post about Molly Gebrian’s book on the neuroscience of music practice, I mentioned resonances with the ideas of the Inner Game. Interestingly, the friend who recommended this book to me was keen to keep the two separate – whilst not knocking what Inner Game principles can offer, he saw this book as much more practical and task-focused than the psychological orientation of the Inner Game.

And I agree that is a useful distinction to make. Nonetheless, as someone who enjoys finding connections, I found in a number of places that Gebrian’s suggestions for practice strategies were not only reminiscent of various aspects of the Inner Game, but also helped explain why they work. So I’ve found it helpful to work through some of these connections.

Practising and the Gebrain: Specific take-aways

In my last post I gave an overview of Molly Gebrian’s excellent book on the neuroscience of practising music. Today I turn my attention to a number of specific concepts she shares that help us understand why we experience particular types of learning experience as effective or ineffective.

Contextual Interference

This is the term used to describe the extra cognitive load that comes with switching between tasks. This is why it feels comfortable to get stuck in and stay with one piece of music for extended periods during our practice. However, as we know, what is comfortable isn’t always the optimal learning experience, and Gebrian recommends using contextual interference strategically in order to make our brains work harder in practice. Finding ways to randomise what’s coming up, and using a timer to schedule regular changes of task make us dig deeper at each change-over. It will probably feel like we’re not doing so well than we feel after a long stint on one piece, but it results in better performances.

Seasonal Earworm Thoughts

I have on multiple occasions had conversations, when musicking in Germany, that went:

German person: Is there an English phrase equivalent to ‘Ohrwurm’?
Me: We say, ‘The Germans have a phrase that translates as ‘ear worm’
Everyone: chuckles

(It is only on looking it up to check my spelling that I discover that this is also what Germans call the insect the English call an earwig. Maybe everyone else knew that already.)

Anyway, I am thinking about earworms because I’m writing this the day after Rainbow Voices’ Winter Concert. As is so often the case, it is the day after a performance when the music I’ve spent the previous weeks preparing for it is particularly vivid in my head. I have a similar experience when delivering an arrangement: just at the point when I no longer need to process the music is exactly when it rings loudly in my inner ear.

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