Listen and Learn...

In this blog I want to talk about this week's subject and the connection of automaticity with elaboration as it appears for me and many professional musicians in how we learn new pieces of music. Musicians who work with a variety of groups across many genres often have to learn as many as 50 songs or more in a week. One might presume there is a lot of active thinking and hours-on-end of practice involved in this process. Not so much. While a professional will put in the practice time to perform his or her parts to the best of their ability, it does not require the hours or the thinking one might imagine. Much of the playing process has become automatic, much in the way a person speaks without conscious processing of language, syntax and grammar.

One of the most useful tools in this process of learning music, especially large quantities of music, is listening. A professional musician will often ask for the recording of the music, not just for transcription purposes, but to listen to the pieces throughout the week while doing other things in between practice times. The act of listening and becoming familiar with each piece does an enormous amount of the cognitive work when it comes time to transcribe and play the piece.

I often recommend this to my students, and tell them that the act of listening allows your brain to conspire for your success. What is mentioned in our module is that the auditory registry is among the sensory inputs that my brain can connect to previously learned and familiar information in my long-term memory. I find this is true. When I am listening, I am registering the sounds, which I recognize in the context of keys and music forms I already know, leaving only the artifacts that are unique to the particular piece I am listening to and will be learning. These smaller "unique" bits of new information are much easier to manage, especially when learning a lot of material. I find many of my peers and those who have worked for me over the years report the same method for learning many music pieces in a short time. The video below (at 48:43), which is part of another blog I’ve done on auditory triggers in tacit knowledge application describes the neurology and phenomenology behind this passive “listen-learning” method many musicians use and that I’ve found useful in both learning and teaching music. Really, the whole video is fascinating, informative, AND, entertaining. ;)

At some point I will do a blog about semiotics and notation if/when we get to a section where we're learning more about concepts related to reading symbols.