When my daughter started taking violin lessons, I joined her in this adventure without having any prior music experience until that point. I still enjoy keeping her company, but more than my miserable advances in playing skills I enjoy learning about the learning process itself and the techniques for developing complex skills that have been distilled in the musical field over the centuries. I should mention that the mathematical aspects of music and the physics of sound generation are always fascinating to me, since they are very close to to what I do professionally as a professor in fluid mechanics.
Once of the things about complex task performance that caught my attention recently was a profound comment made by out teacher, Simon, about multitasking. “A popular view these days is that multitasking is not possible,” he said, “but in fact, I am doing it right now: I am breathing, standing, holding my bow in one hand and my violin in the other, looking at the music score in front of me and talking to you.” “The trick is,” he continued, “to turn all these separate things into one action and mentally treat them as such.”
I found this mental model quite helpful in my music practice. There is one exercise in particular, where you set a metronome at a given tempo and play a sequence of 4 notes, 1 note per beat, in a single draw of the bow. Then, you double the tempo of your playing, keeping the metronome and the bow speed constant – that is, you would play 2 notes per beat, and 2 sequences of the 4 notes per length of the bow. After that, you quadruple the tempo: 4 notes per beat, 4 note sequences per bow. And so on (I couldn’t get past the third step yet on even the easiest of the note sequences). The trick that seems to be working for me for this exercise is to treat the group of notes that are played on the same beat of the metronome as one motion of the fingers of my left hand. So I would focus on individual notes (and fingers that play them) in the first pass, on a pair of notes on the second, and on a group of four notes (as a single motion of the fingers) on the third.
This apparent work-around for the “there is no such thing as multitasking” idea also came up in the book I am listening to (“Indistractable” by Nir Eyal and Julie Li). This phenomenon is well-known in psychology, and it’s called multi-modal stimulation and perception. It means that two or more of our sensory systems – vision, hearing, proprioception (perception of the body position), smell and taste – can process information simultaneously. There is even evidence that human performance of certain tasks can be enhanced if multi-modal stimulation is present. For what it’s worth, I certainly like working while listening to music or even while sitting in a relatively-noisy environment such as a cafe.
Of course, it doesn’t mean that multitasking in a conventional sense of the word is possible (otherwise, as Nir Eyal points out, we could listen to two different podcasts at the same time – one in each ear). But if it’s possible to combine many complex activities into a single one, such as “teaching a violin lesson”, perhaps by applying this mindset wider we can manage something like “going through a day” or even “living a happy life” without being pulled in a million directions by conflicting goals and obligations. Perhaps, there is no conflict, and this goals and obligations are all part of one thing. And, with some practice, we can do one thing at a time.
