Why you should learn a musical instrument
I have liked music very much since I was a teenager. I spent many hours late at night in Soulseek chat rooms talking about and sharing music with my online friends. So, I tend to just have some music floating around in my head on any given day. But, I never learned to play any instrument, or use any digital audio software. It just didn’t catch my interest.
My wife learned to play piano as a kid, so we happen to have a keyboard sitting around in our apartment. One day I was bored so I decided to just see whether I could figure out how to play some random song that I was thinking about right then. I found I was easily able to reconstitute a piano version of whatever melody I was thinking of, just by brute-forcing which notes were which, given a lot of patience. So that was satisfying enough that I wanted to keep doing it.
What I didn’t know is how immediately thought-provoking it would be to learn even the most basic things about playing music. Maybe it’s like learning to program, if you used a computer all the time but you never had one thought about how it might work.
Many of the things I learned immediately that surprised me were about my perception of the music I had listened to for all of my life. In my mind, my subjective experience of remembering music that I am very familiar with seems very vivid. I feel like I can imagine all the instruments and imagine all the sounds, just like they were in the song. But once I had to reconstruct the music myself, it quickly became clear that I was tricking myself in a variety of ways. For example, my memory of the main melody would be very clear. But my memory of any harmony or accompaniment was typically totally vague. I absolutely could not reconstruct something to play with my left hand on the piano, because I wasn’t actually remembering it; I was just remembering something more abstract, I guess.
Sometimes I would be convinced I would remember a melody and reproduce it on the keyboard, but then I would listen to the real song and be surprised. The most common way I got surprised was that in my memory, I had adjusted it so that I could physically sing or hum it, even though I don’t often sing. If there was a big jump up or down the scale, I would do something in my memory that sounded sort of OK instead, like replace it with a repeated note, or the same thing moved an octave, and then forget that it had ever been any other way.
I found that if I was remembering something that had fast playing, I often actually could not remember the specific notes in between beats, even though I felt that I could hear it in my head. No matter how hard I “focused” on my memory I couldn’t get more detail. Actually, I found that there was some speed such that even listening to the music, I could no longer resolve the individual notes, no matter how hard I paid attention or how many times I replayed it.
There have been many more kinds of things I have learned since learning to play a little:
Since playing music on a keyboard is a complicated physical task involving complicated coordination, I learned a lot about what both of my hands are naturally good and bad at, and what sort of things they can coordinate easily or poorly.[1]
Learning the musical structure of songs that I know and trying to arrange them for piano showed me all kinds of self-similarity and patterns inside the songs that I had never had a clue about before. I could listen to a song hundreds of times and not realize, for example, that two parts of the song were the same phrase being played on two different instruments in a very slightly different way.
Often I will be trying to learn to play something using one “technique” for learning and practicing it, and having a hard time, and then I master it almost instantly by switching “techniques” (e.g. by switching what I am using my conscious attention for while I try to play it, or by concentrating on a more specific hard part, or by remembering some part of the musical structure I wasn’t appreciating before) which is a vivid illustration of the power of different tools I have for using my mind.
I could easily go on for many pages. I think it’s kind of silly that even though I have known many musicians, I don’t think anybody really told me how many things I could learn by spending only a very modest amount of effort learning about music. So if you are like me, then that’s my message to you.
- ^
While I was trying to figure out how to play with both hands, I learned a funny thing you can try. Sit down next to some objects. First, just think to yourself that you want to do one thing with your right hand, like take a sip of coffee, and another thing with your left hand, like pick up and turn on your phone. If you’re like me, it’s totally effortless and your hands do it with almost no conscious attention. Then, try again, but think that you want to do it but slowly. You can probably still do it with total ease and fluency, with no attention. Then try it while thinking anything involving two different speeds or timing, like “I want to slowly pick up and sip the coffee, and when I am in the middle of it, pick up and turn on my phone at a normal speed.” If you are like me, your brain will basically panic and be unable to mind both timings without doing a lot of pausing and stuttering and redirecting most of your conscious attention to the task. It seems for me there is a kind of conserved “timer” resource in the brain that can only easily keep one timing at once. ↩︎
This seems similar to the thing in Why Artists Study Anatomy and Drawing Less Wrong, that in order to produce art that accurately reproduces an aspect of reality, you have to actually learn to pay attention to reality. And by learning to produce art, you start noticing all the ways in which your brain usually filters out reality.
I think this generalizes. E.g. to write good dialogue you need to pay attention to how people actually talk and what makes for an interesting conversation; to learn to dance you need to start paying attention to your body, etc.
I think in music you quickly learn to hear and play the right notes, and then it’s just never a problem anymore. The real difficulty is having something to say. In writing and visual arts I think it’s also like that: you learn a basic level of skill, and then it’s all about what you say.
How did training aural imagination go for you, 15 years later?
Yeah, that training took some time, but it worked. I can now write melodies and chords from imagination pretty easily. Have had this skill for awhile now. It’s very useful, though of course not a golden ticket.
My current challenge in music is just coming up with interesting stuff, I think this challenge isn’t gonna run out anytime soon.
This was interesting for me. I’m currently learning the guitar and am torn between continuing or not. It is fun, but there is only a certain amount I can use my hands before I get RSI on any given day.
Besides for figuring out the limits of my hands, which has helped some with developing a better stretching routine. I haven’t had any major improvements in my life because of it.
I did notice that I learned much quicker than I have in the past when I’ve tried to learn instruments. Which tells me that my current character build optimisation towards learning and memory is working. That was a good data point to update on.
It sounds like you’re having a lot of fun though, and your brain sees music differently to mine. I hope it continues to be rewarding for a long time!
Wot.
Please explain!
Oh, it’s nothing exciting. Here are the changes I’ve made since last time.
Started taking longer morning walks and doing yoga
No Tv of YouTube, so that the guitar is like a super stimuli
Taking DHA algae powder instead of relying on walnuts for ALA, that converts to EPA, that converts to DHA and forms myelin sheaths in the brain
Spaced repetition
playing before bed
not cramming practice sessions. Instead playing for 20-30 minutes at a time.
Why do you think DHA algea powder works?
Only bc I’m vegan. If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t be supplementing it.
I wish I could say I had a more accurate model. But my understanding doesn’t go deeper than DHA = Myelin = Faster processing
Was this purely a question? Or is there something I should look into here?
No, it’s just that my prior says nootropics almost never work so I was wondering if you had some data suggesting this did e.g. by dowing a RCT on yourself or using signal processing techniques to detect if supplementing this stuff lead to a causal change in reflex times or so forth.
EDIT: Though I am vegan and I’m really ignorant about what makes for a good diet. So I’d be curious to hear why it’s helpful for vegans to take this stuff.
I wouldn’t say I have a good grasp on Nutrition either. But spent a bit of time last year making sure I could parry any uncomfortable comments about my nutrition my family might make because of my veganism.
It seems the main thing is B12. Even the hard core vegan types, who don’t want to give an inch to the “other side”will admit this one is necessary. That makes me believe it really is.
What I’ll say in this next paragraph might be very wrong. If someone sees this and can call me on anything I’m wrong about, I’d love that.
Before going vegan I took fish oil. That’s because I’d heard Omega 3 was “beneficial for brain function”. That carried over when I went vegan, but I mostly ate walnuts as my source. Then I learnt that there are 3 Omega 3 Acids. (I should have noticed my confusion about that “3”, but I was not a rationalist at the time). I then learnt that ALA gets converted into EPA or another chemical. So by skipping ALA and going straight to DHA you potentially don’t lose anything.
Looking back on this, I think when I’m nearing the end of my current DHA supply I might need to take another look at Omega 3 and its functions. Something about it still feels a little off.
Since you seem interested in nootropics, I wonder if you’ve read Gwern’s list of nootropic self-experiments? He covers a lot of supplements, some of which are pretty obscure AFAICT.
EDIT: https://gwern.net/nootropic/nootropics
I haven’t, but I’ll take a look. I appreciate the recommendation!
Might be worth experimenting a bit with finding more comfortable ways to play. Lots of people (including me) can play the guitar for many hours every day with no problems. But it’s hard for a teacher to tell from outside what’s crampy and what isn’t, you need to rely on your feelings for this.
I do want to +1 that there is a lot of variation in right-hand-position space. For fingerpicking, my training has always been to pluck from the knuckles, which are the strongest and biggest joints in the finger, and never from the joints nearer the fingertips, which are much weaker and tire faster; nor to hook one’s fingers under the string but to simply push past the string. (In case thats helpful.) Might take some time to adjust to any new playing pattern.
As with exercising any part of your body, there’s a difference between tiring your hands out (which is healthy) and hurting them (which is painful and damaging). There should be no sharp pain.
First time poster, he humbly said… Glad to be here though. As a musician, I figured I could chime in on this subject.
Playing the guitar was a tool for developing my intuition. I couldn’t read sheet music. I needed to feel the music. I would feel something within myself, and then translate that into music through the guitar. I would play intuitively. Hear the music in your head, feel the emotion of the song that you want to express, then translate what you feel into playing the guitar through feel not through cognitively reading sheet music.
Once you get past the basics of learning chords, scales, basic rhythm and playing techniques… It became about the feeling. As far as the cramping hands, and blistered fingers… ;) Goes with the territory, but it goes away after a bit. ;)
Learning piano I have been pretty skeptical about the importance of learning to read sheet music fluently. All piano players culturally seem to insist that it’s very important, but my sense is that it’s some kind of weird bias. If you tell piano players that you should hear it in your head and play it expressively, they will start saying stuff about, what if you don’t already know what it’s supposed to sound like, how will you figure it out, and they don’t like “I will go listen to it” as an answer.
So far, I am not very fluent at reading, so maybe I just don’t get it yet.
I have also seen the culture of pianists being used to playing reams and reams of new music, and this being a signal of proficiency more so than amongst other instrumentalists (e.g. violinists or flautists). I think it is probably because the majority of a pianist’s career is spent in accompaniment rather than as a soloist or in an equal ensemble (there are ~no serious piano quartets), and so the quantity of music quickly consumable is a much more competitive asset. When I was at music school, there were professional accompanists and everyone was assigned one, pianists employed simply to go around and accompany all of the students in their performances, so they needed to be able to play a great deal of complicated music very quickly or on-sight.
Personally, my primary goal with sheet music is to get off of it as soon as possible (i.e. learn the piece from memory). It is a qualitative reduction in the number of things my attention is on, and gives me much more cognitive space to focus on how to play the piece rather than what I’m playing next.
I’ve definitely noticed that “not reading sheet music” and “guitar” are concepts that go together, but I have to ask “why do beginning guitarists not learn sheet music?”. It feels something like algebra, where some percentage of the population just look at a different notation with some abstractions baked in and immediately decide it’s not for them.
The first two reasons that come to my mind are (1) other instruments have much more career incentive to do so (in that there are many more jobs for classical violinists or violin ensembles than for classical guitarists), and (2) it’s possible to have a much more successful career as a guitarist knowing only chord positions and not having a more detailed understanding of the fretboard, than it is with other instruments where a knowledge of how to play complicated melodies is required.
That comparison is also thought-provoking) Thinking for a minute yielded that programming may be considered quite similar to playing music, but differs that in programming you do not need to do most things in any specific order. For example, if I have a dataset of a competition participants, it doesn’t matter whether I deduplicate names or remove disqualified entries first.
I’ve been learning acoustic guitar for a few months now, and strongly agree with all of this. There are a lot of resonances with rationality practice here, and it also points out some difficulties that I had not realized. Rational thought takes at minimum tens of milliseconds, which is notably less than how long you have to take actions when playing guitar. Also these actions don’t map in any way to evolved reflex loops (unlike, say, driving or juggling which also have similar reaction time requirements). This means I’ve had to explicitly figure out how to chunk and cache rational thoughts prior to playing, so as to be able to use them during play. Music also allows many opportunities to look back at something you learned and say “How could I have learned this faster”? You’ll find that many people will tell you “You just needed to practice that for hours” for things which you actually could have inferred rationally very quickly if you had stepped back and worked the issue.
I’ve been learning to play diatonic harmonica for the last 2 years. This is my first instrument and I can confirm that learning an instrument (and music theory) is a lot of fun and it has also taught me some new things about how to learn things in general.