Every time I travel and have a chance to live in a new place for an extended period of time, I appreciate how quiet our little cul-de-sac in Victoria is. During our last stay in Paris during my sabbatical, our apartment was on the ground floor, and the entrance from the street led directly to the living room, or séjour, as our Parisian friends called it. When people outside would sit on the steps leading to our door (I suppose, that was a convenient place to sit on the relatively lively street) and have a conversation, it would sound as if they were sitting inside and talking to us. As much as it was nice to have a chance to listen to some native French speakers, it made us appreciate the relative silence of our usual suburban living. Funny enough, the sound insulation in our Paris dwelling was so marginal that it worked, or rather didn’t, both ways. When my daughter or I would start playing violin (being very diligent students) the people outside would often leave, not because of our poor skills (I hope), but because the music would interfere with their conversation. Another evidence of the power of the music.
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.
A productivity hack that I’ve been rediscovering: it makes sense to start an activity early, that is before you are ready. Even more specifically, start before you want to. Once you get going, it would be relatively easy to continue. The reminder for this came in the form of a memo from my daughter’s strings teacher. She wrote to the parents of her students that kids are typically reluctant to pick up an instrument for their daily practice sessions, but are happy to continue playing once they start.
This technique has to do with the theory that we, humans, have a certain amount of inertia that makes us reluctant to stop wha we are doing at the moment and switch to another task. Incidentally, it also means that we should try stopping an activity before we are ready to do so. If the next step of the project is absolutely clear, it would make it so much easier to pick it up again the next day, or whenever it is time for the next session.
I miss pre-COVID cafe environments, where I would often spend half-an-hour or so before coming to the office to catch up on deep work – stuff that is important, but not urgent, which makes it vulnerable to being pushed out of the agenda by shallow, but urgent, things on a daily to-do list. It seems counter-intuitive, because a cafe would be full of people and relatively noisy, compared to my university office, where I could be alone and in a relative sound isolation, if I wanted to. Yet, the amount of ambient noise in a cafe is “just right” for me personally to facilitate focussing on the work at hand. I think the background music and half-discernible conversations prompt my brain to go into the focus mode.
Nowadays, after a year of the global pandemic, many cafes operate as take-out or outdoor-seating establishments. I’ve mostly stopped going there, though, because for all the virus-related risks, the main benefit of providing a focus-conducive environment is missing. Since work had shifted to the home office, I’ve come to rely on home-based substitutes for all things related, including espresso and music. On the latter front, my daughter introduced me to the Cafe Music BGM channel, and I have been enjoying it quite a bit. Just as it should be for proper cafe music, it has a “just right” combination of novelty (in the sense that I am not listening to the same songs in a loop while I work) and monotony (in that there are no vocals – just instrumental tracks.)
So even if the home office cannot provide all the benefits of an academic campus or a hip cafe environments, the ambiance problem has been largely resolved, and my espresso is getting better too.
One particularly neat thing about being a parent to a nine-year-old is that it gives me an excuse opportunity to try various activities alongside her without an expectation of accomplishment. Theoretically, it’s a license to be a beginner without any pressure to improve performance. Still, having this mindset is easier in theory than in practice. Realistically, one still needs to make some progress to maintain motivation. This raises the question: should adult beginners practice differently from children? I don’t know the answer, but I suspect that it is a ‘yes, but only after they’ve acquired the basic skills’.
Take kendo as an example (which my daughter never practiced, by the way, although I had observed other kids’ training). Physical training aimed at improving speed and endurance is a huge aspect of children’s keiko (practice sessions). It is unavoidable for adults too, but beyond a certain level of physical ability, the adults are typically directed to shift their focus to other elements of practice, e.g., technique, strategy, psychology, philosophy. It seems that even though there is no hope for an adult beginner to reach a level of mastery that is hypothetically available to children (provided that the kids don’t quit their practice), a better use of an adult’s time would be to concentrate on other, arguably more advance elements of the art, that are beyond pure physical skills.
If we consider violin-playing (which I started studying together with my daughter), an analogue to suburi (empty strike) practice in kendo would be playing scales. The physical skill, i.e. a combination of manual dexterity and sensory perception, which is required for extracting other-than-horrendous sounds from a violin is considerable, and it makes the learning curve very steep. As expected, my daughter leaves me in the dust in terms of the progress. As much as I would like to play the ‘adult beginner’ card and shift my focus to some of the more exciting practice elements, like dynamics of the phrases, etc., the required threshold of the physical skill remains elusive.
Ready for battle. Stll life with chess pieces.
Chess is another example, where adults often strive to improve, but find it difficult. It is a bit different from both kendo and music in that all these activities are difficult to master, but chess is relatively easy to learn. This accessibility is deceptive. It makes people believe that there is no limit to how much they’d be able to improve. While this “everything is possible if you try” attitude is generally admirable, chess is perhaps the most striking example where innate ability (i.e. talent) is dominant over hard work, perseverance and training methodology. Still, there is an analogy to the practice of musical scales and suburi sword swings in chess. The limiting skill there appears to be visualization – the ability to literally see the position of pieces in your mind, without physically setting them up on the board. This ability not only enable the accomplished players do party tricks like playing simultaneous blindfold games, but more fundamentally, to calculate the possible variations several moves ahead.
So it appears that working on the basics, in other words, practicing like a children, is a good strategy for adult beginners too, even if they they are not aiming to achieve great heights in a particular activity. And if they are aiming high, then it is even more critical, because without mastery of the fundamental skills, their progress will always be limited.
We’ve been training Bruno, our puppy, to be quiet while being confined in his playpen. The training involves getting him to start whining (which doesn’t take much – just diverting our attention from him for a few moments) and giving him a “Quiet!” command. As soon as he stops barking, even for a few seconds, coming to him and giving some reward – a treat, a pet on the head, etc. It seems to be working, but the difficult part is consistency. I find that Bruno is particularly clinging and wants my attention when I really need to focus on something else.
A few days ago I was trying to practice violin-playing, while Bruno was sitting in the next room. I had an electronic tuner clipped to my music stand. It has a microphone and a display that shows the note being played. I noticed that Bruno’s whining spans an entire octave, from A to G#. The funny thing is that at one point I muttered a curse at him for not giving me a chance to play. I didn’t quite say what I wanted to, but the machine rather appropriately showed “F#” on the screen. Is it a sign of an AI?
I have never heard of a prepared piano until a couple of months ago. It’s one of the many music-related things I have not heard about until I started learning violin and piano alongside my seven year old daughter. It’s ironic, because my main work area is related to acoustics, and some of the most fundamental works in the field deal with theory of musical instruments. So it is quite exciting to come face-to-face with some of the physics that I have only known in theoretical or applied engineering contexts.
Last Saturday, my daughter tried playing a prepared piano for the first time. She has been looking forward to it ever since she heard about wedging coins and pieces of rubber between piano strings from our teacher, who studied it systematically and actually wrote a book about John Cage’s techniques. As you can see in the video, she was delighted at the transformation of the piano into a percussion instrument. “I don’t recognize the sounds!” she cried.
What I personally learn from this is that music in general, and musical education in particular, is more about excitement of discovery and joy of “flow” than it is about training for performance. My daughter and I have been incredibly lucky to have teachers, who give us these glimpses of optimal experiences, to borrow a term from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, so early in our studies. “Don’t forget to smile!” Is my daughter’s favourite reminder to me during our practice sessions.
Another thing I learned is to remember to switch my camera to manual focus when filming in a dimply-lit room. To my excuse, though, the whole prepared piano demonstration was very spontaneous, so I was shooting from the hip, both literally and figuratively speaking.
I am studying violin and piano alongside my six-year-old daughter. We both started from the same level – absolute beginners. Yet at the music store, our lesson books are in different sections. I am classified as an adult beginner, while she is a beginner without a modifier. This made me think whether our experiences of learning music are really that different.
I think we, adult beginners, do approach music differently: we are both more and less serious about it. And in both instances, we are wrong.
On the one hand, being a hobby, music is quite low on the list of adults’ priorities. This prevents them from focussing on the practice completely, instead of worrying at the back of their minds whether they should be doing something else at the moment. By not maintaining the focus, the adult beginners miss an essential component of an optimal (read:enjoyable) experience.
At the same time, and ironically in contradiction to the point above, adults expect too much from the music practice in terms of results. For children, the practice itself is the game. My daughter literally plays music, so it is an autotelic activity for her. I, on the other hand, may be able to convince myself with the logical part of my brain that the practice itself is the goal, but somewhere on the background there is an expectation of a payoff, e.g., improvement of my technique. In other words, I play to learn how to play, and my daughter plays for the sake of playing.
The autotelic quality of an activity, when it derives meaning from itself, is another essential component of an optimal experience. It allows children to stick to music practice week after week and year after year, while most adults quit soon after starting because their goals are different. Actually, children don’t even think in terms of goals; they just play.
…This makes me marvel once again at the depth of Nike’s “Just do it” slogan.
At the last tournament, I repeatedly tried to hit the opponent’s kote (lower arm just above the wrist), but judges gave me no ippons for any of the hits. I think this is because my strikes were not sharp enough. There is a particular quality of hits that’s needed to score points in kendo. It is not the force that counts, or even not the speed per se, although speed is important. It is precisely sharpness, snappiness of the hit. And I cannot do it at my current level. At least not consistently.
This presents a conundrum that applies beyond kendo to learning any new skill: how do you practice something that you cannot (correctly) do yet? If you practice using your current, incorrect, form, you risk reinforcing bad habits.
One option is to break down the skill into its constituent parts and work on them one-by-one before trying to connect them. This is how I work on the basics of violin-playing: First, work on the rhythm of a new song using a single open string. Second, get the left hand into position for playing correct notes without paying attention to rhythm or quality of sound. Third, focus on the sound quality (bow movement). Fourth, try to connect everything together and circle back to the rhythm.
In the case of a kote strike, however, the overall motion is already so short and simple that it doesn’t make sense to break it down further. But the overall quality of my kote hit is lacking, so something needs to be done. According to my sensei, the answer is to practice a different, but related, motion, which will eventually support and enable whatever you are trying to perform. In the case of the kote strike, the supporting exercise is matavari suburi – large-amplitude, straight swing of the shinai with maximum speed and an abrupt stop at the end of the swing. I’ve began doing it as my morning warm-up, but haven’t done enough yet to see any qualitative difference in my kote strikes. If anything, it will teach me not to over-extend my elbows at the end of a strike – something that’s annoyingly painful and potentially dangerous.
My violin-playing assignment for the Christmas break is practicing the D major and the A major scales. Finally. When I started the lessons with my daughter four months ago, I expected that I would be doing only “scales and arpeggios” , like Berlioz from “The Aristocats” – the movie that at the time shaped my view of music education.
I can see that breaking up the established muscle memory and coordination between my right and left hands is not going to be easy. That is why kids have an advantage in learning music – they don’t have years of muscle memory to unlearn.
For myself, as a late-starter in music, I see it as a good opportunity to practice John Boyd’s “Destruction and Creation” principle. I recently came across his essay of the same title, and it is a fascinating read. Boyd himself was an amazing character. He developed a highly-influential Energy-Maneuverabilty theory of air-to-air combat. His writing is to-the-point practical and concise but also surprisingly deep in the underlying philosophy.
One of the main ideas is that creative process (he used the process of decision-making as an example) is really a combination of analysis (“destruction”) of the existing mental models in view of the current observations of reality, followed by synthesis (“creation”) of new and improved models from the individual components (concepts, ideas, etc.) that are the result of breaking apart the old models. In other words, breaking-down and building-up go hand-in-hand in a continuously repeating loop. In fact, one of the best-known results of Boyd’s work is the Observation-Orientation-Decision-Action (OODA) loop, which has been the foundation for training of fighter pilots and design of fighter aircraft. There, “Orientation” is the part that contains the analysis and the synthesis of the observed data to form a current mental perspective.
With music, five-year-olds have an advantage over adults in that they have less breaking-down (of existing habits) to do before they can get to the creative part. On the other hand, I’d like to believe that as an adult, if I do the analysis part of my existing habits well, I would have more material to play with when I am eventually in a position to do some synthesis.
” than it is about training for performance. My daughter and I have been incredibly lucky to have teachers, who give us these glimpses of 
