Music – Thoughts on SRSing

Something I’ve been wanting to try for a long time, but never got round to, was trying to SRS music to play on an instrument – as opposed to SRSing songs to sing, which works just fine.  I still haven’t got round to it, but here are some ideas…

SRSing

SRSs are useful because they allow us to revise information we already know far more efficiently than if we were left to the scheduling.  They are best suited to small bits of information – for example, names of capital cities, or example sentences of a language we’re learning.

The main limitation of SRSing for languages though is that, by definition, you can only look at fragments of conversations or text.  It is a skill in itself to follow through an entire TV show or book – or even just a conversation or passage.

Music therefore poses something of a problem – typically, we want to learn complete pieces, which unaltered are unsuited to an SRS.  Even scales take up to 30 seconds to go through (depending on how many times you’re practicing it and how many octaves you’re running through) – this is longer than the ideal time for an SRS card.

The question then is, can we break up pieces of music such that we can productively use an SRS to review them?  I’d say tentatively… yes, although questions need to be asked of whether a scheduling algorithm designed for thought-memory is transferable to muscle memory.  As far as I’m aware, this has not yet been tested.

Possibilities

Good music teachers will tell their students to work on difficult bars of music in isolation.  Once learnt, an individual bar should lend itself well to SRSing, since it’s short.  Building up complex phrases of music progressively should optimise the student’s ability to maintain their ability in what they’ve learnt.

Scales should be quite easy to SRS too – a card could just say “F# Major, three octaves, 240bpm” for example.  I used to (and probably still should) have a deck of cards with each scale written on it – each practice session I’d shuffle them and run through all major and minor scales one by one.  An SRS could easily be adapted to allow this.  Guitar chords could work in a similar way.  You wouldn’t be creating question-answer pairs either – the “question” would be to play a piece of music – this is an opportunity for redesigning the SRS specifically for musicians.

Clearly it would not be so effective for professional musicians who practice for 40+ hours per week – their livelihood depends on them being able to accurately assess what they need to practice, and so they’re good at it.  It would probably be most appropriate for people who practice for a few hours each week (like me), who aren’t so good at identifying the most important things to go through each session.

Limitations

One problem would be in determining what each card should test – after all, the most effective SRS cards only test one thing at a time (e.g. pronunciation/vocab recognition/grammar comprehension etc.).  You’d need to note on each card “tone” or “tempo” to know what was the focus of the card – clearly this would take extra time in creating the cards.

Another problem would be knowing where to position the machine displaying the SRS.  You’d have to put a laptop or iPhone on top of your piano, or balance it somewhere high up enough to be visible to a standing flautist or saxophonist – potentially dangerous for the electronics.  You’d further have to keep tapping a key or screen to tell the SRS when to move on.

The biggest difficulty though would be getting sheet music into Anki in the first place.  This would require some new programming.  Anki is integrated with LaTeX, and so it could also be integrated with Lilypond (open sauce notation software that works like TeX – it compiles sheet music from a text-based file), so that the user could easily and quickly create cards.  I’ve tried importing .jpgs from scans of sheet music into Anki, but it’s a prohibitively long process and produces slightly unattractive results.

To overcome the problem of marrying computers and instruments, you could perhaps have the SRS compile a sheet of things to practice each day, which you could print out.  You tell it after your complete practice whether or not you finished everything to your own satisfaction, noting any sections that were particularly difficult (equivalent to marking a card as “hard”).

Conclusion

If the process of adding cards could be reduced to less 30 seconds per card, it might be worthwhile to SRS music for instrumentalists – otherwise though, the time optimisation of practicing would be offset by the initial time investment in setting up the SRS in the first place.  Also, the scheduling algorithms would probably need revision – this is probably the work of several PhDs.

If anyone’s tried SRSing music already, do share – if not, 1) have you considered it, and 2) how would you try it?

- E

Progressive Grammar 2: Music

“Progressive grammar” is a way of breaking up sentences into their most basic parts and then adding non-essential words one by one. The idea behind this is to work with bitesize chunks of one’s target language – to not overwhelm oneself with sentences that introduced too much that was unfamiliar at once.

We can do a similar thing with music.  If you run into a passage that’s too difficult initially, strip out peripheral notes, and just play the most basic, skeletal rhythm. For example, you might encounter

The trill (written out for clarity), for example, might cause a player difficulties with the overall rhythm, especially if it wasn’t something he’d come across before.  There are various ways of overcoming this – playing super-slowly or getting someone else to play it for you several times would work just fine.

An alternative strategy though would be to initially leave out some of the notes, thus:

Then, you can add back in the semiquavers, having gotten the hang of the general rhythm:

Then it’s only a case of fitting in the trill, which would bring the player to the music as written.  I always find that when there difficult-to-time phrases involving (say) quintuplets or trills, it’s best to start simple and work your way up.

Removing notes can also serve as a starting point for improvisations – it can be a way of making improvisations more structured, without losing the overall shape of the phrase.

Incidentally, if you’re looking for a decent and free score editor, I wrote the above notes quite easily using Denemo, on Fedora, although I don’t know if it’s available on other OSs or Linux distributions.  It’s not as mature as Sibelius, but then, it is open sauce and it is free.

hiatus

Just to let y’all know, I have university finals in less than a month, and so Thousand Mile Journey is going on hold until they’re over.  Really need to buckle down and do some work before it’s too late!

In the meantime, I’d like to draw your attention to Rhinospike which launched recently – it’s a site where you can post things you’d like read out by native speakers.  Obviously, it’s a reciprocal agreement, and it’s weighted such that the more texts you read out for other people, the faster your own requests will be dealt with.  Anyway, have a look, because audio with transcriptions is a fantastic thing to learn from (especially in conjunction with an SRS!).

As a final interesting curiosity, it turns out that unlike Mandarin, in which tones are summarily ignored in songwriting, Cantonese songs tend to have the melody follow the tones of the lyrics.  I was amazed to be told this because it would seem to restrict the number of “allowed” melodies.^[1] Paying attention to the music on my iPod, I would suggest that it’s generally true (and is especially obvious with rising and falling tones).  Anyway, it has a number of interesting consequences – for Cantonese learners, listening to Cantopop might be good for improving tone production and recognition; also, how far can a melody be pushed before it falls outside the “allowed” bounds?  Why can Mandarin songs be understood even when they ignore tones? Thought it was interesting from both linguistic and musical points of view.

Anyway, (for now at least) that’s all folks – best of luck to everyone with whatever you’re learning – don’t give up!  加油, がんばってよ and bonne chance!!

^[1] I could make a crack along the lines of “maybe this is why all Cantopop sounds the same”… but I won’t.

language and music II: multitasking

Playing by ear on a musical instrument is something I think a lot of aspiring musicians find hard – I’d attribute this to an overemphasis placed on reading sheet music, certainly for classical students.  It’s important though, and a skill that needs training, so I figured I’d finally pull my finger out and work on ear training.

Now, I’m a poor, impoverished and overworked student who can’t scrape together the money to get some tracks of backing musicians to improvise over.  So, in the spirit of making do with the resources to hand, I figured a fun thing to do would be to play along to pop and rock songs I already knew, and then use that as a base for improvisation.  Started off with some Crowded House – I’d learned some of their songs on the guitar, and so had a good idea of the chord progressions – and after figuring out the appropriate transpositions in each case, I had a lot of fun just playing along.  Sting was another good candidate, since a lot of his songs already have jazz musicians in – a little harder to play along with, but still possible.

I then figured I could kill two birds with one stone by playing along to some Cantonese artists I liked. Cantonese exposure and saxophone practice at the same time?  Double win.  And thus it came to pass that Rubberband, Kay Tse and Eason Chan all were privy to an extra musician.  Lucky them eh?  Maybe I drowned out what they were singing with my own instrument, but uh… it felt like I was being productive :p

Whilst we’re on the subject, I’d like to reiterate something that has been said about a billion times before – listening to music is a great way towards learning a language.  What hasn’t been elaborated on so much is why.  As ever, there’s more than one reason.  Firstly, it’s fun.  Music is a social tool which most everyone can and does enjoy.  Secondly, it doesn’t get old.  There are songs that I’ve listened to literally hundreds of times, and I can still listen to them again.  Why do children succeed at language acquisition?  Because they just love to repeat the same shizzle over and over.  Listening to music you like gives you a shot at that repetition without getting bored out of your skull.

Anyway, I’d like to hear what other [actual] jazz musicians think of playing along and improvising over pop songs (I have a sneaking suspicion it’s frowned upon).  Language learners – what do you think of music as a learning tool?

practice is not performance

Neal over at Sax Station wrote a post a few days ago about focusing whilst practicing, and that made me think back a couple of years when one of my tutors voiced something quite profound – that practice was not the same as performance, and should never be treated as such.

I’m glad I saw his post, because something I’ve been struggling with for the last couple of weeks is actually making decent amounts of progress in both of my projects.   I think this is direct consequence of performance at the expense of practice.  On the saxophone, I find that I wind up doing pieces I can already play, and in Cantonese I’ve been reading things I can already read and saying too many things I can already say.

Something that Neal specifically pointed out was that practice time is limited – and if there’s just a single bar in a piece of music that’s causing problems, then it doesn’t make sense to play the entire piece from start to finish just to try to get those few notes right.  It wastes time on stuff you can already do at the expense of learning something new – this is something I’ve been getting wrong.

I’m pretty sure the reason for this is twofold – at the moment, I’m playing my saxophone for fun, as relief from my soon-to-be-handed-in dissertation; also though, I think it’s psychological, insofar as I think I have an audience whenever I play (since there are other people in the house).

I think this applies to language learning too.  I have flashcards in my Anki deck which are just native speakers reading out a sentence; my task is to mimic them and understand what was said.  When I come across such a card, it’s tempting (and faster) to just make a half-arsed effort at mimicking the speaker and move on.  Again, the fact that I’m conscious of other people around in the house (who may or may not be listening to me) tends to make me skip over it – after all, I don’t want them to think I’m an idiot saying the same words over and over!  I wind up glossing over the mistakes and not improving as much as I could do all too often.

It takes a considerable amount of self-discipline to accept that neighbours and housemates are going to have to endure a certain number of mistakes and screwups if I’m going to get better; as long as I’m playing through pieces I already know, or glossing over sentences that that aren’t up to scratch, I’m not going to get much better.

Music and language students are always trying to be able to do things they couldn’t do before.  By definition, performance is something you can already do; practice is perfecting what you can’t. As fun or easy as getting out there and showing off what you can already do is, a performance can only ever be as good as the practice put into it.

Man.  This progress malarkey is difficult.

improvement by ear

Something that’s undeniable is that both music and language are undergoing constant change.  All languages.  All types of music.  Looking back at just the last fifty years, we can see the complete evolution pop music – from its beginnings around the time of Buddy Holly and the Beatles, right up to the present day with its various offshoots.  Similarly, we can see the evolution of language on a day-to-day basis – new words are coined, and old words take on new meanings and forms.

This, of course, presents something of a problem for language-learners – it can be difficult to keep up with the most recent trends if you are relying on books and other aging resources as a primary reference, since the pages of textbooks do not automatically synchronise themselves with the progression of living languages.  If you were to try and learn a language from a century old book textbook (with pronunciations approximated to your own language), you’d wind up speaking quite unintelligibly: it’s not predominantly the words that change, it’s the way they are said.

The same problem is evident in music, too, although perhaps not as obviously; whilst recycling old material is far more prevalent, the ways in which the music is played changes over time.  Pop songs from 60 years ago covered now have quite a different flavour to when they were first recorded, even if the notes are the same.  What changes is the way they are played, in the same way as language.

The point here is that the only way of keeping up to speed with things that aren’t committed to paper is to listen. You can’t interpret any alphabet correctly without first hearing what sound each letter corresponds to.  You can approximate them, perhaps with similar sounds from your native language, but you’d never get them quite right – and I think the same is true of music.  To be fluent in any language, you must know what fluency sounds like - and after all, music is a language too.

The more I play my saxophone, the more I find there is a need to focus on a particular sound that I’m trying to achieve to improve.  Ditto Cantonese – that’s been the way I’ve gotten better the fastest.  I don’t think there’s ever a time when we have such mastery of an art that we can ignore all others doing the same thing if we want to maintain our skills.  The world moves too fast for us to stop listening.