Learning

I mentioned in my recent post about a coaching session developing a rehearsal protocol for quartets to support each other in correcting notes that had been learned incorrectly. It felt like it deserved a post in its own right, as it’s something lots of us need to deal with and so it would be useful to work through not just what to do, but why this procedure helps. Plus of course having its own post will make it easier to point back to when I meet other people with the same need!

So, learning any phrase involves generating neural pathways that encode the act of singing it; the more you repeat that act, the stronger the neural pathway becomes and thus the more automated. This is very useful, until it turns out that you have been practising a wrong note, when the strength of your practised neural pathway keeps pulling you back when you’re trying to correct it.

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.

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.

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.

With apologies to Molly Gebrian, the author of the book I’m about to recommend, but what with the cover image and the subtitle about neuroscience my own brain seems irrevocably committed to making her name into a subject-relevant anagram.

TL;DR: Learn Faster, Perform Better: A Musician's Guide to the Neuroscience of Practicing is an excellent book, and you should read it.

Molly Gebrian is a viola player who also spent a lot of her student years studying neuroscience, and has since spent her professional life finding useful practical applications for that extra study to help herself, her students, and now the rest of us too. She presents clear explanations of what’s going on in our brains during various aspects of the learning process, and works through the implications for how we can use our practice time most effectively.

Recent conversations about learning music have identified memorising lyrics as a specific challenge. I feel this one too – the notes and rhythms stick in my head far quicker than the words do, and I have a particular talent for weird random errors in the lyrics while singing (spoonerisms, paraphrasing, malapropisms).

So it seemed like a good idea to collate some of the specific activities and tricks people use to help learning lyrics. If nothing else, having more different things to try the process more varied and thus less boring than if you just plug away at the same thing for the same amount of time. But my hunch is that varying your approach also makes the learning more effective as it means your brain has accessed the material in multiple different ways. Thus, when you have a momentary memory blank from your primary mode of learning, there are other patterns of experience available to fill in the gap.

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.

I spent Saturday in Milton Keynes where I had been asked to deliver a workshop on Vocal Health and Developing Resonance with Junction 14 Ladies A Cappella. I have worked with the group every so often over quite a few years, but always previously in the more standard coaching format. It made an interesting change to approach the day through a single theme. It was overall probably physically less tiring than a coaching day – there were many more opportunities to sit down – but also more cognitively tiring as we were dealing with information as well as skills.

The day was structured around exploring the fundamental elements of vocal craft, introduced in the order in which one needs to get them established in order to set up the instrument: body, breath, phonation and range in the morning, moving onto the resonant cavities in the afternoon. Each involved some sharing of concepts, some exploring in exercises, and some application to repertoire.