Out of a bit of frustration. We've talked about seeing colors, visualizing the notes all sorts of things.
When you play, there is that little voice you hear..."we're coming to a tough part"..."use the alternate B button"..."is this the second time through the turn, or the third....or the first". It also says in the middle of a tune "damn that lady is good looking"..."what am I doing tomorrow?"...."Ooooh did I f**k that up."
I can't imagine I am the only one who has an annoying little voice in my head when they play.
My problem is I can focus it out for just so long. Then it sneaks in, and I screw up in the next bar....three or so notes later. Without fail.
How does everyone else who has this problem deal with it? I already know about drink and drugs... there has to be a better way.
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
I know what zippydw's talking about.
I just go dead, and carry on playing.
Does anyone else feel, at the end of cranking out maybe a passable bit of playing that is audible to other people, and not lost in group mush - "Thank God that's over..."?
What one comes to do, looks forward to doing, goes ahead with and does, week by week - "Thank God that's over..."?
Thinking about what one does can be unsettling, and suggest that one is ruled by some very baffling and contradictory urges.
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
@bazouki dave:
You mentioned Scientology.
A hackette called Marina Hyde who writes for The Guardian had a brilliant idea for an apocalyptic religious culture clash scenario.
It was that the Scientologists and Madonna's Kabbalists should start a turf war in Los Angeles and let it develop into a climactic showdown, seeing off both.
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
My father, a gentle, kind man, would tell you not to play a tune in public until you can hold a conversation at the same time. Probably why I struggled when I started out on the whistle. It came, I think, from years of having to play close attention to dancers. In these more "touchy - feely" times you might find Timothy Gallwey's book "The Inner Game of Music" helpful.
I wouldn't worry about the repeats. After a few years most musicians develop a pretty reliable internal counter, good for all tunes except Johnny Cope and those asymmetrical set-dances
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
P J - I can understand why you struggled with the whistle if you were trying to hold a conversation at the same time. Must have sounded like one of the Clangers conversing!
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
Nicholas
at the end of the turf war, there would need to a set of highland pipes, piping them out. My inner voice says it would be a magnificent finale.
I am not much into Scientology. Spent one lifetime in engineering school for a few years and they even gave me a c ouple of degrees to prove it. That'll show them!
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
zippy--that's a tricky one. one problem is that you are trying to over-rationalize music. to get more psychological, you are trying to use episodic and declarative knowledge to play music, which means you are trying to use verbal instructions (play this note then that note, with that finger, and that finger, while doing this and that), for what is not a verbal task. to use an example, imagine trying to walk and instead of doing it, trying to only do what you told yourself to do (lean to the left, tighten this muscle, then the next, then the next....).
the solution then is to divorce the process from the over-analysization. what that means is not quite so simple... one thing to try is to think of the sound, and then to let the fingers follow. then what does that mean? noel hill told me once that he hears every note as he plays it--the tone, the shape, and the length; when he starts to think about fingers instead of sound, then he starts to get tripped up. the same goes for the rest of us. trying to do this is enough to drive anyone crazy, but it can be very helpful. i have been working on this for two years, and it seems to have made a huge difference.
there are of course other things you can do, but that is way beyond the limitations of this forum.... i can say another thing that helps (along the same veins as above), is to try to LISTEN to yourself play objectively, rather than judge everything you do--treat your playing like a recording. this can be very difficult as well, yet it leads to very interesting places. when you get good at hearing yourself play while hearing in your head what you intend to play, then you end up playing what you hear in your head. this is not to say that you never can think about what you are doing... but it isoften best to put that aside until a lot of your anxiety, judgemental-based analyzing and planning extincts (behavioral conditioning term... it means to fade away). the brain is very complex, and multiple attentional stores can be used concurrently (you can process images and sound separate, for example), so of course you can plan ahead and think about fingers etc., but the tricky bit lies in that these may take away from the attentional stores necessary to play music. this means that if you think words, that is using a verbal/aural attention span, which means you cannot hear the tune in your head nor the tune you are playing as well as if you werent thinking words... this means that it is often helpful to use spatial thinking, visual thinking, and intentional planning (i am not so sure that the research supports this last construct as a separate store of attention) to do the analyzing and judging. well... it is a lot more complicated than that but that should give you the idea.
so... i hope that is helpful. let me know if i am unclear, or if you don't get something... to explain it much better would take a lot more space.
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
to answer the original post in a more personal way--yeah i used to have that voice, and it creeps up now and then. i have worked very hard to get rid of it, and now it is more of a nagging feeling when it appears more than a voice. i put down the flute for at least 6 months because it gets worse when i play the flute. i have played the flute longer, and have a lifetime of those sort of self-judgemental thoughts built up, whereas on the concertina i have only been playing a few years.
i have worked on these sort of things in other domains besides music (much too off topic to go into here), which really accounts for most of the change in my playing. three or four days ago i picked up the flute for the first time in a while--i had not seriously played the flute in at least 2 years, and not even casually in six months--it was as if all those problems went away. all of a sudden i have a good sense of rhythm, i have good rolls, good phrasing, and can do all sorts of things that i could not do before.
keep working at it, and you can get over it. it has taken me at least 5 years after i identified the problem, but it finally feels like i'm finally playing music, rather than just worrying about music. it was really bad for me too... i was always worried about what people thought, to the point where i was trying to play what i thought other people wanted to here, not what i did... and i worried so much that even when i practiced, i could not practice well, because it did not *sound good*. it's mostly gone now, and i can now start to make up for missed time.
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
addendum--i dont think i used the word extinct grammatically in psychological terms. i'm not exactly sure how to use it as a verb... but the term is "extinction." i think the proper way is to say that "when extinction occurs."
so, to rephrase the phrase above: "but it is often best to put that aside until extinction occurs for your your anxiety, judgemental-based analyzing and planning."
to briefly explain it further, extinction occurs for a response (i.e. judging your playing) after sufficient time passes without any reinforcement for the response. i know that is convoluted, but you asked for psychology... without going into how complicated the conditioning for cognitive (mental) behaviors is, we'll just say: replace the voice with something more productive, i.e. listening to the tune in your head and objectively listening to your playing, and the voice will just go away on it's own.
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
Its something that infuriates and fascinates me and daiv's post is very thought provoking. Great post . Would be interesting to hear someone knowledgeable debate some of those points. I'm reading 'The Inner Game of Music" but find it very dissapointing and 'not designed for us' - if the author came on this forum and suggested visualising the score he would get very short shrift. Seems more relevant to performance stress than that litle voice that chatters away when playing in the kitchen,
On one of daiv's points, I find that early I get to a stage where keeping at least the contour of the next part of the tune in my head will quell the destructive scraps of narrative on what comes next. I later get to a stage where I can cope with scraps of internal narrative on what I just did without screwing up. Then 'should have breathed there' usually does not cause a problem but 'what note does the next part start on' does. So the verbal instruction/ verbal commentary issue is not simple.
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
Slightly relevant, brought up more by the 'Inner Game of Music' than this thread. I once accidentaly canoed down a bit river that was safe but considerable more exciting than anticipated with an older guy who had been a bomber pilot in the war. When we came into the pool at the end he said 'like the on the bombers, sometimes the safest thing to do is stop worrying and get on with it". Later in the pub he added "trust to your training and pay attention". One of his points was that when things are moving fast the practice should have removed the need for inner verbal instructions.
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
Are you all talking about Irish folk/dance music? I didn't think it was that complicated. No stress. Enjoy playing. Have a fun time. It's music. Lives are not depending on it.....
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
I think zippydw is talking about distraction. Other discussions have talked about 'concentration' and 'thinking too hard' and Yoda-type stuff. The Inner Game of Music guy is talking mainly about stress - he seems to be addressing a readership of performers, auditioners and examinees. The ex-bomber pilot was also a sports coach. Loads of stuff going on in our heads difficult to work out what comparisons in other activities are relevant to having fun and producing satisfying rendition (avoiding the P word) of a tune.
[warning: whatever was preventing the logoffs whilst typing posts is not working at the moment]
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
Getting back to zippy's original post, in particular his paras 4 and 5, here is my suggestion.
It all boils down to careful structured practice - which, btw, is the other "P" word.
Specifically, slow practice is important because it is the only way, when you're learning a tune, that you can be sure that you're in control and can hear everything you're doing. If you make a mistake, like in an awkward string crossing (oh no, not that one again!), stop immediately and go over the difficult bit slowly as many times as is necessary until you get it right (that's the "looping" you hear people talk about), and then do it again to make sure you can do it right three times in a row. Then proceed. When you've got all the tune without any mistakes at that speed then rack it up by say 10%, and go through the tune again until it's mistake-free. Incidentally, this is where a metronome is useful.
Grasshopper, when you've done this you will have a deep understanding of why all the greatest musicians do anything from 4 to 6 hours a day on their way to that 10,000 hours goal.
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
david h--i agree that it all boils down to distraction, and that you just need to trust yourself. the problem is that it just does not happen for everyone... there's a kink in their cognitive strategies (called a "mental set"), which you get stuck in, and no amount of letting go or talking yourself out of it seems to do anything. i do agree that distraction is the essence of it all--but a huge element is that we are taught to view learning as a right/wrong centric process, when really it is much more complicated than that, as certain things are right and wrong at different times. just as lazyhound said with practicing--technically, you are playing music wrong when practicing (insofar as it would be wrong to play a performance like that), but it is right for such a situation, as it helps in other situations (i.e. performing, playing out, jamming, etc).
shanty--it is all just fun, but it is more fun to play good music than to play poor music, :P.
lazyhound--although you are correct in that surveys have shown that performance music majors have practiced 10,000 hours (vs. music education majors, which have practiced MUCH less), you are neglecting a key moderating variable which makes practice successful--what and how you practice! slow practice is not good enough... you have to practice your fundamentals, isolate different components, and implementation intentions do not hurt, either (a self-determination theory term meaning VERY specific plans for exactly how you will do something). some very important fundamentals include how you approach your music and all the cognitive aspects which that entails. for example, can you play a tune, stop playing for a couple seconds, and get back into the tune as if you didn't stop, without missing time (as if you are at a session, but no one else is playing). one thing that also seems to be essential for mastery is constantly pushing yourself past your capabilities.
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
david-h--well... if you read what i said, i said, "you are missing a key moderating variable..." so that would mean no, it is not practicing itself that gets you past your capabilities. the problem is you are assuming that practice in itself leads directly to mastery. my point was that practice time and mastery are moderated by how you and what you practice (including pushing yourself)--without the right ways of practicing, i.e. the right moderators, practice time does not correlate with mastery. moderating variables, by definition, are necessary for the correlation between A and B--A and B do not correlate without the influence of their moderators. in other words... without pushing yourself past your capabilities and practicing fundamentals (the RIGHT fundamentals, too...), it does not matter how much you practice, you will not be able to master your instrument.
i am not saying that practice time in itself does not indirectly correlate with ability--the number of 10,000 hours you cited was based on studies of different types of music majors, (as far as i recall), comparing music education, orchestral players, and those orchestral players who were virtuosic soloists. i cannot remember the numbers for the first two types of players, but it was significantly less than the average of the virtuosic soloists, which was 10,000 hours. this is just a simple correlation--A (mastery) tends to go up as B (practice time) increases. the study does not go further than this, as it did not take in more information, such as complicated analyses of practice time utilization or self-deterministic factors (analyses of motivation and implementation of intentions).
by using this model, all you need to get better is to practice. it is assumed that a mediating variable therefore would be passion or commitment (motivation, etc), i.e. the reason that the virtuosi are better is because they are more motivated to practice, so they practice more (please note that mediating variable is different than moderating)--that is the mechanism which supposedly underlies the correlation.
what i am saying, then, is that this is not the case, that it is more complicated--although A (mastery) and B (practice time) do positively correlate, this is not the full picture, and you cannot invert the correlating variables with their moderator (my phrasing is wrong here, i'm sure). again, as i said that pushing yourself past your capabilities is a moderating variable on the correlation between mastery and practice time, i would not say that practice time causes pushing yourself past your capabilities, but rather than pushing yourself past your capabilities causes your practice time to be effective.
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
**for the last line, "but rather THAT....". sorry.
organic peat creature--you're right. i emailed a professor of mine and he said extinguish was the most common way to use extinction as a verb in psychology.
lanannas--learning and playing music is all very complicated. there is so much involved. it is absolutely amazing that we are capable of it at all.
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
daiv - It was lazyhound who brought up the 10,000 hours and he did so after a longish paragraph that exemplified how he was using the word 'practice' and which included over-reaching ones capabilities slightly and then dropping back to fix things. He then brought up the 10,000 hours up in a way that does not invite the false interpretation you appear to be responding to.
I was using 'practice' the way lazyhound meant it. I suspect that there is a lot of similarity between tripping over the rhythm in tune and tripping over your feet running on rough ground with a predator behind you.
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
Well said daiv. So then having an understanding of the ' right fundamentals' plus commitments and passion, and practising these fundamentals for the required amount of time depending on the individual[s] in question can lead to a mastery of the instrument and style of music played. Would that be correct in your opinion?
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
Thanks. Amazing jumping back in/
My home computer died over the weekend so I had to wait to get here via the office machine.
daiv- That's very thoughtful. i appreciate it. I got a few off line emails which were also very helpfuly. I know I am over thinking....but the little voice gets so annoying. And it does get worse under stress.
I have to really foucs to isolate the voicewhen I play for my teacher. Some days it works others not. Another hill to climb.
I have to reread all of these posts. Alot of advice here.
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
david_h--i was aware that you were using it in the same sense that he was, and in the post directly prior to yours to which i responded, you can see how i had commented on lazyhound's reference to 10,000 hours as well as his definition of practice. i said that his definition did not go far enough; although i agree with him that slow practice is essential, saying slow and task-isolating practice is the key to mastery is only part of the picture.
when i responded to you, i was trying to expand on what you said, and not directly refute it--i did not dispute the correlation between practice and mastery, but only that it has mediating variables, that there is that "extra something" needed to make practice and mastery mix up. i say the same for practicing slowly and isolating. it is the number one thing i will tell students to, so i agree that it is unequivocally important to isolate parts of phrases, skills, and tasks, and to go over them slowly. however, you can go slowly and learn nothing, and go slowly and expand your understanding, increase your appreciation, and make difficult actions and behaviors automatic and effortless.
what i mean by pushing yourself is definitive within the term itself--it is not about trying something you cannot do, and going back to a nice safe corner and working on it after you have discovered you cannot do it. rather it is constantly challenging yourself, and refusing to practice in a complacent frame of mind. you can practice slow comfortably, or you can ache and reach for that quiver at the end of a note, obsess over the snap of your wrist, or spend hours debating the crispness of your rolls. it is not enough to practice until you get it right, but to run almost as if in fear from your comfort zone and away from merely doing the motions, to constantly reach for the unattainable, and scrutinize where you are and what you are doing to discard what's holding you back.
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
zippy--i hope all of our input can be helpful. it is a really frustrating problem. i would like to add, however, that you cannot just "stop overthinking" to make the problem go away. i think metacognition (thinking about thinking) is one of the most powerful tools we have to enact change and modify behaviors, as well as let go of those automatic processes which are ineffective, such as the over-analytical voice. just think of it this way: how could you ever learn to stop over-thinking it, unless you think about how you are thinking about music in the first place? although you can say overthinking is the problem, i would say that you have too much of the WRONG type of thinking--not too much thinking.
i say this from the perspective that if you can have different types of intelligence (spatial, analytical, interpersonal, mathematical, bodily-kinesthetic, etc), that there should therefore be different types of thinking to go along with them. there are certainly different types of memory stores--short and long term memory behave differently for sights, sounds, smells, actions, emotions, etc etc--then it would make sense that there would be different ways to think for each way of experiencing the world. if we can process a memory in a modality (images, sounds, etc), then surely we can think in that modality to, because otherwise we would be unable to manipulate or contemplate our memories.
i only say this because i am not very familiar with research on "types of thinking," but the research on types of intelligence and different types of memory are very extensive, and i think it is not too liberal to make the inference i do to say that you can supplant your thinking with another type of thinking, which is less belabored, and more effective. others might call this "not overthinking it," and i agree with what they are referring to. i just prefer to frame it is "stop overthinking that way" as wel l as to "stop underthinking in other ways," or in other words, "start over thinking in the right ways." it is clear that great musicians do over think what they do--obsessively so--but they do not overthink about it all in the same way which is holding you back. it may sound convoluted, but i think it can be useful sometimes to think of it that way.
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
Apologies to zippydw if that was a closing comment on his discussion, but just wanted to respond to daiv.
OK, I misunderstood what you were saying, but I still think you are referring to things that lazyhound did not say. He said 'careful structured practice' and then specifically mentioned slow practice as part of that relevant to the subject of the discussion. Not being complacent is implicit in being 'sure that you're in control and can hear everything you're doing' .
For my own practice (music and most everything else) I can't go along with your meaning of 'pushing yourself' and your 'run almost as if in fear from your comfort zone'. Something can be mentally taxing without being stressful; in my book adrenalin is for emergencies and occasional short term-deliberate use. Not for practicing something that, as shanty says above, lives do not depend on.
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
I didn't think these things ever ended!
This seemed to generate some good discussion.
Trucks_Mulligan on some previous posts took me to task a bit for not being more active when I post something like this. Fair.
There are times when I am more able to keep up and so just drop a line in so people know I haven't converted to Momonism , or redirected my musical interests into the polymodal music of the ancient Balinese!
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
In regards to 'play slowly' and 'be in control', there's also much to be learned from being 'dragged around the floor' so to speak by a more experienced player or group of players on those tunes you know. Nothing stretches your limits like...well, regularly stretching your limits!
Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
Out of a bit of frustration. We've talked about seeing colors, visualizing the notes all sorts of things.
When you play, there is that little voice you hear..."we're coming to a tough part"..."use the alternate B button"..."is this the second time through the turn, or the third....or the first". It also says in the middle of a tune "damn that lady is good looking"..."what am I doing tomorrow?"...."Ooooh did I f**k that up."
I can't imagine I am the only one who has an annoying little voice in my head when they play.
My problem is I can focus it out for just so long. Then it sneaks in, and I screw up in the next bar....three or so notes later. Without fail.
How does everyone else who has this problem deal with it? I already know about drink and drugs... there has to be a better way.
I can't wait to see Ilig get ahold of this one!
# Posted on September 11th 2009 by zippydw
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
Give up Scientology its obviously not helping
# Posted on September 11th 2009 by bazouki dave
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
I'm hoping that soon i won't have to count my repetitions, I've only been playing a for a bit but its annoying if your not in the mood to count.
# Posted on September 11th 2009 by dlunney
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
Take a cue from Bruce Lee's, Enter The Dragon.
Lee: Don't think. FEEL. It is like a finger pointing away to the moon. Do not concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory.
It's the art of playing the tune without playing the tune.
# Posted on September 11th 2009 by Lint - upon - Tweed
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
Concentrate without concentrating, you must, Skywalker.
# Posted on September 11th 2009 by SWFL Fiddler
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
I know what zippydw's talking about.
I just go dead, and carry on playing.
Does anyone else feel, at the end of cranking out maybe a passable bit of playing that is audible to other people, and not lost in group mush - "Thank God that's over..."?
What one comes to do, looks forward to doing, goes ahead with and does, week by week - "Thank God that's over..."?
Thinking about what one does can be unsettling, and suggest that one is ruled by some very baffling and contradictory urges.
# Posted on September 11th 2009 by nicholas
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
(Can I hear llig saying, "Well - don't go back to that session till you're good enough..."?
It would be a reasonable response!)
# Posted on September 11th 2009 by nicholas
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
@bazouki dave:
You mentioned Scientology.
A hackette called Marina Hyde who writes for The Guardian had a brilliant idea for an apocalyptic religious culture clash scenario.
It was that the Scientologists and Madonna's Kabbalists should start a turf war in Los Angeles and let it develop into a climactic showdown, seeing off both.
# Posted on September 11th 2009 by nicholas
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
My father, a gentle, kind man, would tell you not to play a tune in public until you can hold a conversation at the same time. Probably why I struggled when I started out on the whistle. It came, I think, from years of having to play close attention to dancers. In these more "touchy - feely" times you might find Timothy Gallwey's book "The Inner Game of Music" helpful.
I wouldn't worry about the repeats. After a few years most musicians develop a pretty reliable internal counter, good for all tunes except Johnny Cope and those asymmetrical set-dances
# Posted on September 11th 2009 by Sweeney Astray
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
P J - I can understand why you struggled with the whistle if you were trying to hold a conversation at the same time. Must have sounded like one of the Clangers conversing!
# Posted on September 11th 2009 by RichardB
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
Nicholas
at the end of the turf war, there would need to a set of highland pipes, piping them out. My inner voice says it would be a magnificent finale.
I am not much into Scientology. Spent one lifetime in engineering school for a few years and they even gave me a c ouple of degrees to prove it. That'll show them!
# Posted on September 11th 2009 by zippydw
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
Wow, hats off to Ms. Hyde, I think she solved all of Hollywoods' problems in one fell swoop. Kudos.
# Posted on September 11th 2009 by SWFL Fiddler
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
close eyes until drunk enough to play with them open and perv freely
# Posted on September 11th 2009 by Miss Mulligan
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
Jeez, now my inner voice is going to be prattling, "What would Ilig say...."
# Posted on September 12th 2009 by worthy
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
Zippy, is your problem the fact that the all of the inner voices are arguing with each other instead of agreeing?
# Posted on September 12th 2009 by fauxcelt
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
zippy--that's a tricky one. one problem is that you are trying to over-rationalize music. to get more psychological, you are trying to use episodic and declarative knowledge to play music, which means you are trying to use verbal instructions (play this note then that note, with that finger, and that finger, while doing this and that), for what is not a verbal task. to use an example, imagine trying to walk and instead of doing it, trying to only do what you told yourself to do (lean to the left, tighten this muscle, then the next, then the next....).
the solution then is to divorce the process from the over-analysization. what that means is not quite so simple... one thing to try is to think of the sound, and then to let the fingers follow. then what does that mean? noel hill told me once that he hears every note as he plays it--the tone, the shape, and the length; when he starts to think about fingers instead of sound, then he starts to get tripped up. the same goes for the rest of us. trying to do this is enough to drive anyone crazy, but it can be very helpful. i have been working on this for two years, and it seems to have made a huge difference.
there are of course other things you can do, but that is way beyond the limitations of this forum.... i can say another thing that helps (along the same veins as above), is to try to LISTEN to yourself play objectively, rather than judge everything you do--treat your playing like a recording. this can be very difficult as well, yet it leads to very interesting places. when you get good at hearing yourself play while hearing in your head what you intend to play, then you end up playing what you hear in your head. this is not to say that you never can think about what you are doing... but it isoften best to put that aside until a lot of your anxiety, judgemental-based analyzing and planning extincts (behavioral conditioning term... it means to fade away). the brain is very complex, and multiple attentional stores can be used concurrently (you can process images and sound separate, for example), so of course you can plan ahead and think about fingers etc., but the tricky bit lies in that these may take away from the attentional stores necessary to play music. this means that if you think words, that is using a verbal/aural attention span, which means you cannot hear the tune in your head nor the tune you are playing as well as if you werent thinking words... this means that it is often helpful to use spatial thinking, visual thinking, and intentional planning (i am not so sure that the research supports this last construct as a separate store of attention) to do the analyzing and judging. well... it is a lot more complicated than that but that should give you the idea.
so... i hope that is helpful. let me know if i am unclear, or if you don't get something... to explain it much better would take a lot more space.
# Posted on September 12th 2009 by daiv
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
to answer the original post in a more personal way--yeah i used to have that voice, and it creeps up now and then. i have worked very hard to get rid of it, and now it is more of a nagging feeling when it appears more than a voice. i put down the flute for at least 6 months because it gets worse when i play the flute. i have played the flute longer, and have a lifetime of those sort of self-judgemental thoughts built up, whereas on the concertina i have only been playing a few years.
i have worked on these sort of things in other domains besides music (much too off topic to go into here), which really accounts for most of the change in my playing. three or four days ago i picked up the flute for the first time in a while--i had not seriously played the flute in at least 2 years, and not even casually in six months--it was as if all those problems went away. all of a sudden i have a good sense of rhythm, i have good rolls, good phrasing, and can do all sorts of things that i could not do before.
keep working at it, and you can get over it. it has taken me at least 5 years after i identified the problem, but it finally feels like i'm finally playing music, rather than just worrying about music. it was really bad for me too... i was always worried about what people thought, to the point where i was trying to play what i thought other people wanted to here, not what i did... and i worried so much that even when i practiced, i could not practice well, because it did not *sound good*. it's mostly gone now, and i can now start to make up for missed time.
# Posted on September 12th 2009 by daiv
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
addendum--i dont think i used the word extinct grammatically in psychological terms. i'm not exactly sure how to use it as a verb... but the term is "extinction." i think the proper way is to say that "when extinction occurs."
so, to rephrase the phrase above: "but it is often best to put that aside until extinction occurs for your your anxiety, judgemental-based analyzing and planning."
to briefly explain it further, extinction occurs for a response (i.e. judging your playing) after sufficient time passes without any reinforcement for the response. i know that is convoluted, but you asked for psychology... without going into how complicated the conditioning for cognitive (mental) behaviors is, we'll just say: replace the voice with something more productive, i.e. listening to the tune in your head and objectively listening to your playing, and the voice will just go away on it's own.
# Posted on September 12th 2009 by daiv
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
Its something that infuriates and fascinates me and daiv's post is very thought provoking. Great post . Would be interesting to hear someone knowledgeable debate some of those points. I'm reading 'The Inner Game of Music" but find it very dissapointing and 'not designed for us' - if the author came on this forum and suggested visualising the score he would get very short shrift. Seems more relevant to performance stress than that litle voice that chatters away when playing in the kitchen,
On one of daiv's points, I find that early I get to a stage where keeping at least the contour of the next part of the tune in my head will quell the destructive scraps of narrative on what comes next. I later get to a stage where I can cope with scraps of internal narrative on what I just did without screwing up. Then 'should have breathed there' usually does not cause a problem but 'what note does the next part start on' does. So the verbal instruction/ verbal commentary issue is not simple.
# Posted on September 12th 2009 by David50
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
That was to daiv's first post. Crossed.
# Posted on September 12th 2009 by David50
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
Slightly relevant, brought up more by the 'Inner Game of Music' than this thread. I once accidentaly canoed down a bit river that was safe but considerable more exciting than anticipated with an older guy who had been a bomber pilot in the war. When we came into the pool at the end he said 'like the on the bombers, sometimes the safest thing to do is stop worrying and get on with it". Later in the pub he added "trust to your training and pay attention". One of his points was that when things are moving fast the practice should have removed the need for inner verbal instructions.
# Posted on September 12th 2009 by David50
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
Are you all talking about Irish folk/dance music? I didn't think it was that complicated. No stress. Enjoy playing. Have a fun time. It's music. Lives are not depending on it.....
# Posted on September 12th 2009 by shanty
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
I think zippydw is talking about distraction. Other discussions have talked about 'concentration' and 'thinking too hard' and Yoda-type stuff. The Inner Game of Music guy is talking mainly about stress - he seems to be addressing a readership of performers, auditioners and examinees. The ex-bomber pilot was also a sports coach. Loads of stuff going on in our heads difficult to work out what comparisons in other activities are relevant to having fun and producing satisfying rendition (avoiding the P word) of a tune.
[warning: whatever was preventing the logoffs whilst typing posts is not working at the moment]
# Posted on September 12th 2009 by David50
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
" dont think i used the word extinct grammatically in psychological terms. i'm not exactly sure how to use it as a verb"
'Extinguish'?
# Posted on September 12th 2009 by CreadurMawnOrganig
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
Getting back to zippy's original post, in particular his paras 4 and 5, here is my suggestion.
It all boils down to careful structured practice - which, btw, is the other "P" word.
Specifically, slow practice is important because it is the only way, when you're learning a tune, that you can be sure that you're in control and can hear everything you're doing. If you make a mistake, like in an awkward string crossing (oh no, not that one again!), stop immediately and go over the difficult bit slowly as many times as is necessary until you get it right (that's the "looping" you hear people talk about), and then do it again to make sure you can do it right three times in a row. Then proceed. When you've got all the tune without any mistakes at that speed then rack it up by say 10%, and go through the tune again until it's mistake-free. Incidentally, this is where a metronome is useful.
Grasshopper, when you've done this you will have a deep understanding of why all the greatest musicians do anything from 4 to 6 hours a day on their way to that 10,000 hours goal.
# Posted on September 12th 2009 by Trevor Jennings
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
david h--i agree that it all boils down to distraction, and that you just need to trust yourself. the problem is that it just does not happen for everyone... there's a kink in their cognitive strategies (called a "mental set"), which you get stuck in, and no amount of letting go or talking yourself out of it seems to do anything. i do agree that distraction is the essence of it all--but a huge element is that we are taught to view learning as a right/wrong centric process, when really it is much more complicated than that, as certain things are right and wrong at different times. just as lazyhound said with practicing--technically, you are playing music wrong when practicing (insofar as it would be wrong to play a performance like that), but it is right for such a situation, as it helps in other situations (i.e. performing, playing out, jamming, etc).
shanty--it is all just fun, but it is more fun to play good music than to play poor music, :P.
lazyhound--although you are correct in that surveys have shown that performance music majors have practiced 10,000 hours (vs. music education majors, which have practiced MUCH less), you are neglecting a key moderating variable which makes practice successful--what and how you practice! slow practice is not good enough... you have to practice your fundamentals, isolate different components, and implementation intentions do not hurt, either (a self-determination theory term meaning VERY specific plans for exactly how you will do something). some very important fundamentals include how you approach your music and all the cognitive aspects which that entails. for example, can you play a tune, stop playing for a couple seconds, and get back into the tune as if you didn't stop, without missing time (as if you are at a session, but no one else is playing). one thing that also seems to be essential for mastery is constantly pushing yourself past your capabilities.
# Posted on September 13th 2009 by daiv
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
Is it not practice that gives the abilities, if not distracted, to go past what we think our capabities are ?
# Posted on September 13th 2009 by David50
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
Excellent posts Daiv, very interesting to read your viewpoint.
# Posted on September 13th 2009 by piobagusfidil
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
david-h--well... if you read what i said, i said, "you are missing a key moderating variable..." so that would mean no, it is not practicing itself that gets you past your capabilities. the problem is you are assuming that practice in itself leads directly to mastery. my point was that practice time and mastery are moderated by how you and what you practice (including pushing yourself)--without the right ways of practicing, i.e. the right moderators, practice time does not correlate with mastery. moderating variables, by definition, are necessary for the correlation between A and B--A and B do not correlate without the influence of their moderators. in other words... without pushing yourself past your capabilities and practicing fundamentals (the RIGHT fundamentals, too...), it does not matter how much you practice, you will not be able to master your instrument.
i am not saying that practice time in itself does not indirectly correlate with ability--the number of 10,000 hours you cited was based on studies of different types of music majors, (as far as i recall), comparing music education, orchestral players, and those orchestral players who were virtuosic soloists. i cannot remember the numbers for the first two types of players, but it was significantly less than the average of the virtuosic soloists, which was 10,000 hours. this is just a simple correlation--A (mastery) tends to go up as B (practice time) increases. the study does not go further than this, as it did not take in more information, such as complicated analyses of practice time utilization or self-deterministic factors (analyses of motivation and implementation of intentions).
by using this model, all you need to get better is to practice. it is assumed that a mediating variable therefore would be passion or commitment (motivation, etc), i.e. the reason that the virtuosi are better is because they are more motivated to practice, so they practice more (please note that mediating variable is different than moderating)--that is the mechanism which supposedly underlies the correlation.
what i am saying, then, is that this is not the case, that it is more complicated--although A (mastery) and B (practice time) do positively correlate, this is not the full picture, and you cannot invert the correlating variables with their moderator (my phrasing is wrong here, i'm sure). again, as i said that pushing yourself past your capabilities is a moderating variable on the correlation between mastery and practice time, i would not say that practice time causes pushing yourself past your capabilities, but rather than pushing yourself past your capabilities causes your practice time to be effective.
# Posted on September 14th 2009 by daiv
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
**for the last line, "but rather THAT....". sorry.
organic peat creature--you're right. i emailed a professor of mine and he said extinguish was the most common way to use extinction as a verb in psychology.
lanannas--learning and playing music is all very complicated. there is so much involved. it is absolutely amazing that we are capable of it at all.
# Posted on September 14th 2009 by daiv
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
daiv - It was lazyhound who brought up the 10,000 hours and he did so after a longish paragraph that exemplified how he was using the word 'practice' and which included over-reaching ones capabilities slightly and then dropping back to fix things. He then brought up the 10,000 hours up in a way that does not invite the false interpretation you appear to be responding to.
I was using 'practice' the way lazyhound meant it. I suspect that there is a lot of similarity between tripping over the rhythm in tune and tripping over your feet running on rough ground with a predator behind you.
# Posted on September 14th 2009 by David50
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
Well said daiv. So then having an understanding of the ' right fundamentals' plus commitments and passion, and practising these fundamentals for the required amount of time depending on the individual[s] in question can lead to a mastery of the instrument and style of music played. Would that be correct in your opinion?
# Posted on September 14th 2009 by piobagusfidil
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
Thanks. Amazing jumping back in/
My home computer died over the weekend so I had to wait to get here via the office machine.
daiv- That's very thoughtful. i appreciate it. I got a few off line emails which were also very helpfuly. I know I am over thinking....but the little voice gets so annoying. And it does get worse under stress.
I have to really foucs to isolate the voicewhen I play for my teacher. Some days it works others not. Another hill to climb.
I have to reread all of these posts. Alot of advice here.
Thanks again
# Posted on September 14th 2009 by zippydw
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
david_h--i was aware that you were using it in the same sense that he was, and in the post directly prior to yours to which i responded, you can see how i had commented on lazyhound's reference to 10,000 hours as well as his definition of practice. i said that his definition did not go far enough; although i agree with him that slow practice is essential, saying slow and task-isolating practice is the key to mastery is only part of the picture.
when i responded to you, i was trying to expand on what you said, and not directly refute it--i did not dispute the correlation between practice and mastery, but only that it has mediating variables, that there is that "extra something" needed to make practice and mastery mix up. i say the same for practicing slowly and isolating. it is the number one thing i will tell students to, so i agree that it is unequivocally important to isolate parts of phrases, skills, and tasks, and to go over them slowly. however, you can go slowly and learn nothing, and go slowly and expand your understanding, increase your appreciation, and make difficult actions and behaviors automatic and effortless.
what i mean by pushing yourself is definitive within the term itself--it is not about trying something you cannot do, and going back to a nice safe corner and working on it after you have discovered you cannot do it. rather it is constantly challenging yourself, and refusing to practice in a complacent frame of mind. you can practice slow comfortably, or you can ache and reach for that quiver at the end of a note, obsess over the snap of your wrist, or spend hours debating the crispness of your rolls. it is not enough to practice until you get it right, but to run almost as if in fear from your comfort zone and away from merely doing the motions, to constantly reach for the unattainable, and scrutinize where you are and what you are doing to discard what's holding you back.
# Posted on September 14th 2009 by daiv
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
zippy--i hope all of our input can be helpful. it is a really frustrating problem. i would like to add, however, that you cannot just "stop overthinking" to make the problem go away. i think metacognition (thinking about thinking) is one of the most powerful tools we have to enact change and modify behaviors, as well as let go of those automatic processes which are ineffective, such as the over-analytical voice. just think of it this way: how could you ever learn to stop over-thinking it, unless you think about how you are thinking about music in the first place? although you can say overthinking is the problem, i would say that you have too much of the WRONG type of thinking--not too much thinking.
i say this from the perspective that if you can have different types of intelligence (spatial, analytical, interpersonal, mathematical, bodily-kinesthetic, etc), that there should therefore be different types of thinking to go along with them. there are certainly different types of memory stores--short and long term memory behave differently for sights, sounds, smells, actions, emotions, etc etc--then it would make sense that there would be different ways to think for each way of experiencing the world. if we can process a memory in a modality (images, sounds, etc), then surely we can think in that modality to, because otherwise we would be unable to manipulate or contemplate our memories.
i only say this because i am not very familiar with research on "types of thinking," but the research on types of intelligence and different types of memory are very extensive, and i think it is not too liberal to make the inference i do to say that you can supplant your thinking with another type of thinking, which is less belabored, and more effective. others might call this "not overthinking it," and i agree with what they are referring to. i just prefer to frame it is "stop overthinking that way" as wel l as to "stop underthinking in other ways," or in other words, "start over thinking in the right ways." it is clear that great musicians do over think what they do--obsessively so--but they do not overthink about it all in the same way which is holding you back. it may sound convoluted, but i think it can be useful sometimes to think of it that way.
# Posted on September 14th 2009 by daiv
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
Thanks
# Posted on September 14th 2009 by zippydw
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
Apologies to zippydw if that was a closing comment on his discussion, but just wanted to respond to daiv.
OK, I misunderstood what you were saying, but I still think you are referring to things that lazyhound did not say. He said 'careful structured practice' and then specifically mentioned slow practice as part of that relevant to the subject of the discussion. Not being complacent is implicit in being 'sure that you're in control and can hear everything you're doing' .
For my own practice (music and most everything else) I can't go along with your meaning of 'pushing yourself' and your 'run almost as if in fear from your comfort zone'. Something can be mentally taxing without being stressful; in my book adrenalin is for emergencies and occasional short term-deliberate use. Not for practicing something that, as shanty says above, lives do not depend on.
# Posted on September 15th 2009 by David50
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
I didn't think these things ever ended!
This seemed to generate some good discussion.
Trucks_Mulligan on some previous posts took me to task a bit for not being more active when I post something like this. Fair.
There are times when I am more able to keep up and so just drop a line in so people know I haven't converted to Momonism , or redirected my musical interests into the polymodal music of the ancient Balinese!
# Posted on September 15th 2009 by zippydw
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
In regards to 'play slowly' and 'be in control', there's also much to be learned from being 'dragged around the floor' so to speak by a more experienced player or group of players on those tunes you know. Nothing stretches your limits like...well, regularly stretching your limits!
You can't learn to fly by walking all the time!
# Posted on September 15th 2009 by SWFL Fiddler
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
Sorry zippy, your response bumped the thread to the top of the recent discussions tab and my big mouth hopped back in here. Carry on.
# Posted on September 15th 2009 by SWFL Fiddler
Re: Getting 'touchy/feely'- Psychology of ITM again
have another Guinness. That's what Guinness is for ...
# Posted on September 16th 2009 by dogmageek