Guest on the Unformatted podcast with Ryno the Bearded

This past week, I was a guest on a podcast show called Unformatted. The host, Ryno the Bearded, does podcasts dedicated to Creative Commons music, and Unformatted is the looser chat/interview show.

Check out the podcast at http://rynothebearded.com/2014/09/mere-exposure-effect

The show is a bit over two hours long and covers topics including: copyright, music business, economics, participatory vs performance-based music, philosophy of art, barbershop harmony, software freedom, and more. Overall, it's a good casual summary of my whole personal story of my life and career and how I came to my current understanding and feelings on these topics.

Many Ways to Introduce Guitar (or related instruments)

There's no one right way to start learning the guitar.

Even within the scope of strict classical guitar, teachers debate all sorts of things: Should we start with the plucking-hand alone or including the fretting-hand right away? Start with rest-stroke or free-stroke? Start with only rote listening and following of a teacher or use standard notation? Start with single note melodies or with chords and arpeggios?

Break out of classical assumptions and the options grow exponentially. Start finger-style or with a pick? Start with standard tuning or open tuning or other alternatives? Learn simple songs or simplified versions of more complex songs? Focus on solo guitar or guitar as accompaniment to singing or guitar as in a band context? Use tab or notation? Start with blues, rock, pop, Flamenco, folk-songs, or another style?

Even all those options have cultural assumptions. So, I prefer to start by teaching the basic physics of the guitar (which are truly universal to all styles and approaches). Then, we can explore the options creatively! However, despite my love of open-ended creative exploration, I've found that many students do best with the plain old traditional approaches. It varies from student to student based on personality, interests, and experiences from other studies (both musical and otherwise). With so many different things to learn, even advanced guitarists with decades of experience may remain totally unaware of some of the basics in other directions than the ones they know.

I already posted a lesson video on the rhythmic foundation of guitar. That's one great way to start. Today, I'm sharing a handful of other lesson videos which are still are only a sample of the countless approaches to the instrument.

Rhythm Guitar Lesson

I've been teaching guitar lessons professionally for around 15 years, and certain things keep coming up. I've been wanting for a long time to record the core set of lessons that I teach various students on day one. I can't teach every student everything, but there are a dozen or so ways to get started playing guitar. Each approach has a different focus.

Here's the first of the series:



Of course, there are a lot of details not covered in the video. So here I'm sharing further notes that touch on things I typically cover in the next several lessons (with varying amount of detail, depending on each student).

A Framework for Studying Human Experience

Intro

I've always felt in-touch with both holistic and analytical ways of seeing the world. Breaking things down into distinct parts can be a valuable way to make sense of reality. But human cognition does not have the capacity to deal with great numbers of broken parts all at once — let alone the capacity to recognize how the parts could fit back together again. Sometimes, we need to step back and try to take in the whole picture. When we then return to analyze separate parts, we may not be able to comprehend all the connections, but we can at least try to keep context in mind while looking at any particular item.

I have always been interested in music, but as a student, I was uncomfortable with the degree to which music study seemed divorced from broader context. In the years since finishing my Bachelor of Music, I've grappled with cross-disciplinary questions that led me to study physics, biology, psychology, sociology, philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, and other fields. I can't claim expertise in these areas, but I've learned a lot. And through my studies, I have gained insights into music which seem more profound and valuable than the things I learned in my music courses.

Recently, I've been considering a return to academia, but I've struggled with choosing the right direction. I now recognize that there are many angles to get at the same questions, and I want to be sure that any program I pursue has a good perspective on how different fields of inquiry fit together.

One of my main concerns is the apparently persistent divide between science and humanities. I appreciate much of what I've seen at conferences and such, but I often feel that the bias for certain angles of study is greater than what would be expected just because people have their particular specialties. Humanities folks (a group which includes the majority of music-related researchers) seem to make everything about culture. Of course, there have been countless debates about universals versus cultural differences, debates about different approaches to scholarly inquiry, debates about nature versus nurture, and so on. There is enough material for scholars to make entire careers out of just studying the history of these debates as a meta-topic. Trying to make sense of all of this, I've developed my own framework to address the different angles of inquiry, and that's what I going to describe here.

My interdisciplinary framework

The deep questions most of us have are basically about understanding the nature of our own experience. We will never be able to know or explain everything, of course. But while our abstract models are imperfect, they may still be useful.

The figure to the right is a diagram of an intellectual framework which I find useful for contextualizing understanding, research, and experience. I don't think any element here is overall more or less important than the others. To reasonably explain any of our experiences, all these levels need to all be acknowledged.
The figure represents a hierarchy of unidirectional restrictions. We live in the inner circle and only experience the outer levels indirectly. We necessarily experience and understand physics through our subjective and culturally-influenced perspectives. Yet while culture influences physicists, culture cannot alter the basic physical laws of the universe. Physical reality imposes absolute restrictions on the possibilities within all the lower levels, not vice versa.

Book Review: Guitar Zero by Gary Marcus

At 40 years of age, Gary Marcus had no music training and no apparent musical talents, but he loved music. With the excuse of testing the learning capacity of adults, he decided to commit to really giving music a try for the first time. In his 2012 book Guitar Zero, he tells of his experience. More significantly, he somehow managed to condense a vast overview of diverse research in music psychology and the psychology of learning into a fun read for all audiences.

If you assume this to be an instructional book, you will be overwhelmed. To follow the path of Professor Marcus, first become a tenured faculty at a well-funded institution; then get a paid sabbatical. As Marcus clarifies, the lack of dedicated time is the primary obstacle for most adult attempts at learning new skills. So, now that you have time, funding, and professional connections to call on, the next steps are simple: Make arrangements to meet some of the most famous living musicians; go take lessons with several of the very best teachers; and get the top experts in music psychology and theory to personally answer your questions and advise you on what research to read. With these simple steps, you too can become an adequate amateur musician!

Of course, Marcus is not suggesting that others could follow in his steps exactly. Instead, this book is more about the science of music and the science of learning, as told through a quirky personal story. Simply put, there's been no way to test theories about adult learning versus child learning. Children regularly put in persistent commitment over many thousands of hours; and researchers can't find adult beginners able to do the same. So Marcus decided to be subject number one.

Absolute vs relative pitch — my take

I was practicing guitar — in this case, sight-reading through a book of intermediate/advanced exercises in all different keys — when I found myself, as usual, distracted by reflective ideas about how I was processing the music. In this case, I found myself modulating back-and-forth between processing the notes in an absolute manner versus a relative manner...

Sitting down to write this, I worry about how to take on one of the most controversial issues in all of music in a short article. Entire books and websites and learning programs have been made on this topic. I do not have time or space to review them all or cite all the vast amounts of research, but the Wikipedia articles are a good starting point: Absolute pitch / Relative pitch.

There is more than enough evidence to conclude that all normal people are sensitive to both absolute and relative pitch. Some rare people are highly sensitive to absolute pitch, including the ability to explicitly name any pitch regardless of context — a skill often called "perfect pitch." All my personal acquaintances who have this  ability are children of piano teachers or at least started music training at a very young age. It seems that full development of "perfect pitch" requires explicit connection between consistent sounds and consistent names during a critical period in early childhood. Nevertheless, everyone seems somewhat sensitive to absolute pitch (see The Levitin Effect).

In his wonderful book Sweet Anticipation, David Huron argues (among a great number of other insights) that absolute pitch is unremarkable (it is easy to understand a neuron firing for particular pitches, and absolute pitch is how most animals recognize sounds). In contrast, the uniquely human ability to recognize relative pitch patterns is more cognitively significant. He supposes that when most children pick up on the idea that songs can follow patterns independent of their exact frequency, sensitivity to absolute pitch is actively suppressed in favor of relative focus.

Review: Musical Cognition by Henkjan Honing

Musical Cognition: A Science of Listening is a short, concise book for popular readers that describes University of Amsterdam professor Henkjan Honing's particular views of music. This review is of the 2011 English translation recently published by Transaction Publishers.

With only 160 brief pages, this is a relatively quick read. The book is more like a long pamphlet introducing basic ideas but not getting deep. The writing style is very accessible and clean, with no technical jargon, notation, or traditional music theory. The 15 short chapters have clear internal breaks and section headings, so it is very easy to digest this in tiny chunks, which is something I appreciate in any book, whether popular or technical.

Brain Parts Song VIDEO (and Creative Commons discussion)

Several weeks ago, I posted a recording of my new Brain Parts Song. I mentioned then that it called for a video, and I realized later that I couldn't rely on someone else to do it. But that doesn't mean I had to create everything from scratch. Thanks to the internet and Creative Commons, I was able to put together a very effective video:

The player above is from YouTube, but I also uploaded to Vimeo
and to Archive.org, a great media site that is free, open, and non-profit! I also posted files with chords at that link.

There's so much in this video packed into 3 minutes, so I highly recommend repeated viewings/listenings for anyone wanting to use this song as a memory/learning aid. The song lacks the exact repetitiveness of much pop music, but it can be pretty catchy after hearing it enough.

I was concerned about my original audio-only recording for learning purposes because the brain parts are not the words being rhymed, so they could be wrongly mixed up and the song would still work musically. I think having the associated video content solves the problem. I'm a bit disappointed how the mistake/joke about the Anterior Cingulate Cortex isn't as surprising and funny as it is with audio alone, and other hidden subtleties in the recording are more obvious now that they are illustrated visually, but there's new subtleties and details in the video content, so it's all good.

Side-note: as the video hints at, these ideas are simplistic beginning concepts. Besides plasticity, even concepts like having separate motor and sensory areas are wrongish. The whole neocortex has motor and sensory aspects. The main distinction within the cortex is more about which parts are most connected to signals from elsewhere in the brain and body. Don't take any of these rough elementary 101 ideas too strictly.

I had fun making this, and I hope everyone enjoys it and maybe learns something too.

Read on for discussion of making this with Creative Commons, and for credits and lyrics

New recording: The Brain Parts Song

After giving up the chance to start my PhD now, I'm pushing myself to get involved in lots of projects until I potentially re-apply to grad schools. Among other things, I'm taking an online class through the local community college: Human Development and Learning. This class relates to my interests in psychology and education, plus it will be valuable if I ever pursue formal teacher certification.

This week's assignment was to do something creative involving learning the basic parts of the brain, so I wrote a song, of course:

Brain Parts Song by Aaron Wolf

I had to fight the urge to be a perfectionist. I simply didn't have time to add all sorts of instrumentation or details or make a video... maybe another time, but I'm busy with other things.

This song is very purpose-driven: a song for memorizing. Unfortunately, I don't think it does that optimally. These brain part names are really hard to rhyme, so I resorted to rhyming words that fit descriptions of the parts. However, that choice means that the names could be erroneously mixed up and the song would still work musically. Plus, this might be too much content crammed into three minutes — it would be more memorable if there were room for more exact repetition. I'm happy with the result, and I did my best, but it may not be the best study tool for everyone... At least it's a fun song.

Review: The Music Instinct by Philip Ball

It is at once mundane and yet remarkable how much one's impression of the world is influenced by what one focuses on. In college, I was taught traditional eurocentric classical music theory. Though some exceptional professors had broader perspectives, it seemed they were still resigned to the primacy of the conservative traditions. Not wanting to be an ignorant critic, I made a conscious effort to understand and appreciate the traditional views. Later, I did the same with guitar pedagogy: reading through all the classical literature to understand that perspective. I learned a lot and valued some of the ideas, but I felt small and alone in my persistent interests in music cognition, ethnomusicology, and other less-classical approaches.

More recently, I began seeking out more cutting edge contemporary research. At first, I had little guidance because most of my professional acquaintances have only superficial awareness of the questions that interest me. But then one connection led to another, and I was soon overwhelmed with books, journal articles, conferences, websites, music, and names. It seems I wasn't so alone after all. Now I feel as though I am just one of a vast number, possibly even a majority, of younger researchers and teachers who are fully engaged and open to the broad perspectives on music that are available in the 21st century. It now seems to me that everyone acknowledges the validity of all the world's musics, appreciates the insights of cognitive neuroscience, and is interested in the whole complicated discourse of various perspectives. But, is this impression just a result of with whom and with what I am now surrounding myself? I think the reality is somewhere in the middle.

Philip Ball's new book The Music Instinct: How Music Works and Why We Can't Do Without It presents an impressive overview of the current issues in music scholarship, balancing respect and awareness of both classical perspectives and the important questions of global and scientific insights. Reading it, I felt very humbled. How can this popular science writer (who is not a career musician and who has covered a wide range of subjects from art to physics to biology) be so knowledgeable about all these music issues that took me years of study to understand? He even seems to possess a thoughtful perspective on evaluating it all.

Ball starts off with an introduction that beautifully addresses the concerns that I and others have dealt with in today's world of music. It emphasizes the inherent musicality of cognitive music listening skills over the Western emphasis on performance and note-reading. He addresses the concerns that ethnomusicologists have about attempts to understand music universally. He deals with the philosophical questions of music's significance to humanity.

Ball's book, along with other recent popular titles like This Is Your Brain On Music by Daniel Levitin and Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks, is another sign that the zeitgeist is shifting. The questions I have been asking for a long while are now mainstream. (Incidentally, I was excited to see Ball using the same music/cooking analogy which I developed independently). As I read further, however, I found that The Music Instinct is a mixed attempt, still hampered by some of the older assumptions and terminology. The Western art music tradition is foremost, balanced mostly by reference to Western popular music. Ball understands and explicitly states that non-Western music traditions are as rich, but he knows less about them and so offers little in that direction aside from some minor mentions. While his attitude is commendable, his compilation of a wide range of subjects is a jumble of blocks that struggle to cohere into a greater whole.

The main value of this book is its up-to-date overview of many of the interesting subjects at the forefront of musicology today. I see it as a signpost in the exciting progression of our understanding of music. It does not get all the way to the destination that is in sight — a place where understanding of music will be comprehensive, better organized, and liberated from cultural or historical bias.

The Music Instinct fails to justify the subtitle of "why we can't do without it." Even the known benefits of music, such as making repetitive work more fun and tolerable, are not addressed here. My own consciousness was raised by the remarkable movie Sound and Fury. In one scene, some members of the deaf community, happy — even proud — in their deafness, dismiss the supposed importance of music. I think, in fact, we can do without music, though I, for one, certainly prefer having it. And I enjoy understanding music enough to appreciate Philip Ball's compendium of issues in musicology despite his imperfect organization. I'm just not quite sure to whom I could recommend the book. It is too difficult a read for any true novice, not optimal for teaching music appreciation or theory, and not in-depth enough for serious academics (I was particularly frustrated that he mentions studies sometimes without any identifying title or citation). Perhaps the best fit is someone like me: already aware of many of these issues but interested in reading different perspectives.

Read on for more content summary and further discussion:

Octave equivalence? Not so fast...

Sometimes I just feel like such an iconoclast in the world of music theory and pedagogy. Today I was inspired to make a video that attacks one of the most basic precepts of Western music theory: the idea of octave equivalence. To be sure, I'm far from the first to question the nature of octaves. I was inspired because today during a break I was practicing and came up with a very straightforward and accessible way to present one angle on the subject... read on and see the video below:

There are so many problems with the generic idea of octaves as taught in Western music that I can't get into them all here. The question of why do we treat octaves as equivalent has to be qualified by questions of when. In Bill Sethares' notable book Tuning Timbre Spectrum Scale (the link includes summary and samples), he describes and provides audio examples of how the idea of equivalence and blend is related to the particular vibrations in a sound's spectrum. Among the simplest examples, as piano tuners know, the inharmonicity of hammered (or plucked) strings can lead to stretched octaves. Bill goes on to discuss harmony for completely inharmonic sounds as well, which is a whole further (and very interesting) issue.

There have been many attempts to explain why the octave is so significant, some based on carefully controlled scientific experiments. What we know about octaves is that they are, at the most basic, a doubling (or halving) of vibration speed (or close). Because of that, they blend very well and fit into the same overall periodicity. Men and women have likely been singing octaves since prehistoric times. The vast majority of all the world's music treats the octave specially, usually with equivalency, giving the same note name to pitches at an octave.

While the significance of octaves must be acknowledged, there is more than enough evidence to disprove any claim that octaves are absolutely universally equivalent. Octaves are not fully equivalent. They sound different. Harmony does not work the same way at all octaves. A close position major chord sounds great in middle to high ranges, but move it down some octaves into bass ranges and it sounds muddy even if the tuning is not tempered. The vast majority of all guitar methods teach that octaves are equivalent and so any combination of C, E, and G makes a C chord; but the very same books near-universally teach students not to play the low E when holding a C chord. That E doesn't fit as well the harmonic series of the rest of the C chord, so it sounds rougher. If they explain at all, most books and teachers just say that while E is technically part of the chord, we just don't play it because it sounds bad. Some books say it is because the lowest note should be C for a C chord. And yet there is widespread acceptance of the same chord with a low G bass note (which fits the harmonic series in that octave better than the E). Explaining all this is simple once we drop the idea that octaves are totally equivalent.

Another great example is Diana Deutch's Mysterious Melody. She shows how if the octaves are mixed up in a melody it is unrecognizable. Significantly, however, once the melody is known by hearing it normally, then one can still hear it within the mixed-up-octaves version! So octaves have some equivalence: they can substitute for one another if our expectations are clear. But they aren't fully equivalent; it is based on expectations and context.

A common question says, "if octaves are equivalent because they fit into the same periodicity and are a simple 1:2 ratio and part of the harmonic series, wouldn't the 1:3 ratio be comparable and therefore also be equivalent?"

Maybe octaves are more significant because of cultural reinforcement. Maybe it's because men and women don't have such different ranges that they would sing at an even further 1:3 ratio. Maybe it's because 1:3 can be divided by 1:2, thus making 1:1.5 which is not as simple and thus 1:2 is more absolutely basic... but maybe we shouldn't even assume that 1:3 can't be equivalent. Maybe it can be.

I was playing around with this today and decided to make a video showing how effective it is to play at a set 1:3 ratio (called a twelfth in standard Western music theory terms counting letters; also called a tritave in harmonic terms because it's a multiple of 3)

Notice how the final note in the video sounds fully resolved (it does to me anyway). Both the low and high notes each feel not just like part of a tonic harmony but actually feel like the main tonal center, even though one is E and the other is B. But this isn't bitonality to me, though it might be arguably similar. I think this is more like twelfths/tritave equivalency and feels about the same as octave equivalency, just lacking the life-long cultural reinforcement. Maybe in a 12ths/tritave-based theory the E and B would actually get the same name, like we usually do with octaves (for example, the Bohlen-Pierce tuning is tritave-based). Sure, 12ths/tritaves don't sound really identical, but remember that octaves don't either...

EDIT update 11/15/10:
I should mention that the technique I used (playing some music and then checking whether an isolated tone seems to fit) has technical terms. The preparation listening is called "priming" and the isolated tone is called a "probe tone." These are some of the standard methods used in empirical studies of music cognition. My simple demonstration could easily be repeated in controlled testing administered to a number of listeners from different backgrounds. Different priming and different probe tones could be used. The results could better clarify my hypotheses about the potential for listeners to learn 12ths-equivalence (or other alternate equivalences), though additional varieties of tests would be needed to truly be conclusive.