The Nonlinear Library: LessWrong LW - Why you should learn a musical instrument by cata
May 16, 2024
04:50
Link to original article
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Why you should learn a musical instrument, published by cata on May 16, 2024 on LessWrong.
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...
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Why you should learn a musical instrument, published by cata on May 16, 2024 on LessWrong.
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...