Category Archives: memory

Not so long ago I read a fascinating book called How we learn, written by Benedict Carey, a reported for the NYT.

Our brains take in a huge amount of information – that’s not news to me. But what really caught my interest here is this: it’s not just about what we can store and recall, but also about what we need to forget. This is not the place to go into the complexities of the different areas of the brain and their functions, but suffice to say, we filter everything (subconsciously and pretty well instantly) and this information is stored in different ways, dependant on how useful it is. And in general, random stuff – stuff which doesn’t appear to relate to anything else – is pretty quickly sifted out. [It is in fact stored as well, but retrieval can be hard because it is seen as uneccesary so it’s put somewhere at the back I guess!] There is so much that we need to have access to that it would be impossible if our brains had everything immediately to hand, so actually it’s vital that these filters work well.

In the 1880s, Hermann Ebbinghaus developed a series of more than 2300 three-letter nonsense syllables, such as RUR, HAL, MEK, BES, SOK, DUS. And then spent months learning lists of up to thirty-six of them! He then tested his memory of them at specific time periods – 20 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, 48 hours etc. Perhaps unsurprisingly, as time passed, his recall was less and less successful, and after 12 days he could remember little more than 25%. [I can vouch for this with my own experience of learning digits of Pi!]

In the 1920s, the Russian neuropsycologist Alexander Luria began a series of experiments on Solomon Shereshevsky, who had a seemingly endless memory. Once he had studied a chart like the one here for about 3 minutes, he could recall it – reading up, down, backwards – not just for a few days, but for years! Shereshevsky was a synesthete, and for him numbers, letters and words were tinted with associations of colour, taste, shape etc which enhanced his recall.  He might have had an amazing memory, but because his ‘memory filters’ were effectively switched off, he found day to day life very difficult because he found it impossible to sift out the constant conflict of associations attached to just about everything.

Aside from the fact that learning lists like these would appear to be pretty pointless, I suspect that most of us would look at both of these scenarios and think it unlikely that we could remember them – the main reason being, of course, that they are totally random.

Contrast this then with work done by Philip Ballard in the early 1900s, who conducted experiments on memorising Longfellow’s The Wreck of the Hesperus.

At daybreak, on the bleak sea-beach,
A fisherman stood aghast,
To see the form of a maiden fair,
Lashed close to a drifting mast.

In short, unlike with Ebbinghaus’ random syllables, he found that people’s recall actually improved at successive intervals; there is so much here of imagery and story that the brain recognises it as useful and so it is not assigned immediately to the trash!

So where is the musical application is this?

Whether notated music is written for a single line, or in the case of pianists and others, several notes simultaneously, in one respect it can be seen simply as a series of events.

On these three lines there are 110 note events. My question is this: How random are they? The answer is, undoubtedly, that these notes aren’t at all random, quite the opposite. To a young musician, however, learning a new piece of music, it is often the case that they don’t yet have the experience to place a new piece of music in context, and therefore much of what is before them might well appear, to them, to be random.  Rather like the list of numbers above. Wow, imagine how horrible that would be: to go to a maths lesson and wade through all of those random numbers, in the knowledge that you are to be quizzed on them the following week… No thank you!

Somehow we need to be sure that we help our pupils to access the imagery, the story [theory maybe?] or whatever else they might need to help them to make sense of the notes in the piece of music which they are learning. Otherwise, perhaps it’s no wonder that, although we think we’ve spent time teaching them a piece, we sometimes find ourselves frustrated that they don’t seem to have taken anything in…..

I am currently reading an amazing book by Daniel Kahneman called Thinking, Fast and Slow. He presents the idea that we have two systems for thinking – System 1 is effortless and intuitive (fast), System 2 uses deductive reasoning (slow).

An example of Thinking Fast might be in recognising something, a car for instance – we just know it’s a car! Thinking Slow might be finding the answer to a sum, say 18 x 23 – we know it’s a multiplication sum, and how to do it, but we also know that it’s going to take considerable mental strain to hold various subtotals in our head before we arrive at the answer – and indeed it does!

However, Kahneman goes on to suggest that, with sufficient training, we can reach a point where we have expert intuition. It strikes me that, in my own field, this might be called musicianship! I am particularly interested in how we can strive to attain this expert intuition, especially with regard to the transition from reading the score to memorizing it.

The quote on the front of this book – “a lifetime’s worth of wisdom” – is pretty spot on. There are numerous things to share, but I particularly like this line:

anything that occupies your working memory reduces your ability to think

In short, processing all of those notes on the page takes a huge amount of our working memory – in Kahneman’s terms, it takes a great deal of Slow Thinking to make it all happen. The better way, I’m sure, would be for us just to be able to trust our instinct and play, but realistically that’s probably not going to happen. Unless, of course, we have that expert intuition (aka musicianship). There are a whole host of ‘back up’ devices which the musician needs to develop, which support and ultimately should replace the note reading element in our playing. Individually they might all seem rather trivial stuff that we just have to learn; theory, aural, scales, diminished sevenths… But actually, these things are the building blocks which develop that intuition, that musicianship. If we can recognise a dominant seventh chord for instance, and know that it is likely to resolve to it’s tonic, then we will know that A7 falls to a chord of D – and then it is less of a surprise to find that we are playing notes which fit with D major. Of course we can read them too, but this little bit of learned knowledge gives us a hint of intuition to back up the reading bit; in other words, the notes which we play are not longer a random coincidence, but we actually understand why they are how they are! And if we can hear the dominant seventh as well, then our ear might also give us a few suggestions as to what sort of sound to expect next. A little harmonic knowledge and aural skills combined will go a long way, to the point that we may well find that we arrive at the right place before we even read the notes!

Even before discovering Kahneman’s book, I realise that I have subscribed to his way of thinking for some time. I have often thought of memorizing music as having installed it on the hard drive, as opposed to accessing a memory stick (oh, the irony of a name!) The difference is that we hear the computer whirring as it processes the information on the memory stick ie this is Slow Thinking. If we can install the notes on our hard drive, that is, memorise the music, then Fast Thinking becomes a very real possibility. And the way to do that is to develop an expert intuition, our understanding of how the music works – our musicianship.

By the way, the answer is 414!

When children first learn to read, they work out one word at a time, and it can be very obvious to the adult that, although they might eventually reach the bottom of the page, they haven’t actually taken in the meaning of the words which they have read. Reading each word has demanded their entire focus, and has not been understood in context. As they become more familiar with the way that language works, they become increasingly fluent, and eventually we hope that they will read with understanding, and with a rise and fall in the intonation of the voice which further enhances the meaning not just of the words, but of whole phrases and paragraphs.

My pupils are very familiar with the phrase ‘know it, don’t read it.’  In other words, if they are having to work out each note afresh every time they encounter it, how well do they really know the music? There are two distinct levels here: we might be able to play a piece faultlessly from beginning to end, and therefore know the music, in as much as we know what all the notes are, what order they come in, the correct rhythm etc. But in the same way as the child in the illustration above can read the words but not understand them, I would question the merits of teaching a student to play a piece without also helping them to understand the wider context in which the notes are found.

The simplest way to test whether our pupil really knows the music, of course, is to take the dots away!

I find that the first response is usually ‘I can’t do that!’ However, a few choice questions from the teacher might provoke a different response: ‘Can you remember what key the piece is in?’ What note does it start on?’ ‘Can you sing back the first part of the tune?’ Questions like these can help the pupil to realise that actually they can remember some of the music, but much more significantly, they might also find that a little theory helps them recall it. If the piece is in F major, it begins to make sense that the first bass note is F and the melody starts on A, since both fit in the chord of F major.

This is one tiny example – but I firmly believe that children can be stretched, and that they can and indeed enjoy being stretched – it’s exciting and enabling. Especially if they believe that their teacher believes that they can do it. And believe me, they can!

Taking the music away gives us all sorts of excuses to find endless ways of remembering the music; children are endlessly resourceful and they are also amazingly inventive, but whatever way they might come up with, they are now investigating the music in a new way. Before, all they had to do was decypher the notation, nothing more – a potentially daunting exercise but little more than that. Now, they have to enquire, to search their mind for connections between the notes in order to remember them. And it is this which will open their eyes and ears to the way in which the music is put together; keys and chords suddenly become useful guides, rhythms need to be internalised, the ear might remember something which the fingers did not. Pianists can look at the keyboard and see patterns there too.

This is how I love to teach music theory and aural. Not at a desk with a pencil and paper (although I do love that too!) but at the same time as learning the music. The music, not just the notes.

Don’t play the notes… Play the meaning of the notes
Pablo Casals

My current preoccupation with memory has not only had a profound effect on my own playing, but just as significantly, on my teaching too.

Let’s suppose that a pupil is learning the melody line of a piece. The first objective would generally be to practise this line until it is fluent. But once they can do this, it is perhaps worth asking how much have they learned? Well, they’ve learned to process the notes so that they can read (accurately and in real time) what comes next, so that there are no mistakes and the melody flows. They might also have included accurate dynamics and phrasing, which will capture the necessary rise and fall of the line so that the composer’s wishes are fulfilled. Job done. Really?!

Now take the music away. Can the student remember which note the melody started on? No? So let’s ask the same question again – how much have they actually learned? I’d argue very little, if anything; they haven’t learned anything about the music – all they have been doing is reading it, but nothing has been retained, internalised, remembered. They haven’t learned the music at all, just how to play it; and these two things are very different indeed!

If they can remember the first note, how much more follows that? Not much, or a surprising amount? And do they know how they are remembering it? Is it because the melody rises in a scale, or maybe an arpeggio? If so, what key does that scale or arpeggio belong to? Can they tap the pulse?  Does a particular finger pattern help them to remember the next bit, or maybe, for pianists, the pattern is of all white notes except for the final one which is black? Perhaps their muscle memory fails them, but they can pick out the rest of the melody by ear? All of these are potential triggers to help the memory, but they also ensure that the student is constantly analysing what is going on, possibly from multiple angles. If this isn’t developing an enquiring mind, nothing is!

I am not suggesting for a moment that a weak pupil, or even a talented one for that matter, should be told that she should instantly be able to memorise a whole piece, with no help, all in one go, by analysing numerous, complex elements of music which they might barely be aware of. What I am suggesting, however, is that by introducing a little memory work into our lessons, we can ensure that our pupils are investigating for themselves how the music works. Over time, they will begin to develop an understanding of phrase structure, chords, sequences, as well as improving their aural and analytical skills – in fact, there is a pretty endless list of things, all of which will enhance their musicianship. That’s much better than just learning to play the notes with little idea of what is actually going on.

In terms of teaching time, I don’t find that asking a question takes any longer than giving an answer; ‘What dynamic does the music change to in bar 5?’ (said whilst swiftly covering up that bar) takes no longer than ‘Remember to play forte in bar 5′, but the difference is that the former requires the student to think, and thinking is good!

for further reading (!), follow this link to The 5Es for outstanding instrumental teaching