Scarcity and the Seductive Tunnel of Notes

One of the most important new books I've read is Scarcity: The New Science of Having Less and How it Defines Our Lives, by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir. It gave me a new framework to understand the perennial bugbears of ensemble playing, such as:

• How is that someone can't recognize when they drag the beat?
• Why don't we believe those who tell us we're the one dragging the beat? 
• Why do some ensembles slow to an insipid pace despite the constant, fervent efforts of the band leader? 

Tempo? Never heard of it. This is
the tunnel of notes, buddy...

The authors say it has to do with tunneling. That's the curious phenomenon of perceptual exclusion under conditions of scarcity. A starving man tunnels in on food, ignoring whatever danger it takes to get it. The overworked executive is scarce on time. He'll tend to make shortsighted decisions the further behind schedule he gets. "Scarcity leads us to tunnel and neglect other, possibly more important things" say the authors. We become so myopic that we're prone to doing some pretty stupid stuff.

Furthermore, those who tunnel often make the mistake of borrowing. The working poor might resort to usurious payday loans. They don't intend to get trapped in debt, but that's what happens. Your doctor or cable guy borrows time from future appointments, pushing your appointment back. Again, not intentional. 

So what does this have to do with music? What's the connection to ensemble playing? It occurred to me that musicians also experience time scarcity. Quite often, in fact. They tunnel and borrow too. And if they're not careful, they can bring down the whole ensemble. 

Most of the time we sight read our parts. We can't take them home to practice unless we remember to take a picture with our smart phone. Thus we never master our parts. Week to week we'll make the same mistakes over and over again. All those careful pencil marks usually serve to remind you that you just muffed it again. You'll do the same next week, too. 

All that sight reading is a cognitive challenge. And by that, I mean terrifyingly difficult. Notes whiz by when the tempo picks up. We experience time scarcity, and that means tunneling. The big mistake many of us make to tunnel in on notes instead of tempo. To play each note, we have no choice but to borrow time in the form of dragging the tempo. 

It's unintentional, unconscious, and deadly to ensemble playing. If more than one or two people succumb to this effect, the many competing tempos will derail the whole band. It's a train wreck. 

So why tunnel in the notes instead of the tempo? The answer is literally there in black and white. When we work from printed music, the visual will trump the aural every time. The notes are the most salient item we perceive. They're tangible objects on the page. But tempo is intangible and not as salient. Too bad it's the most important thing for ensemble playing. 

Printed music tempts us to get our priorities exactly backwards. Mats Holmquist writes about this inversion of priorities. Bill Watrous talks about the prevalence of head charts in bygone eras. And if you look at videos of bands that do use printed music, it's often placed at the musicians' feet. That's not just to make the band look better. It also has the effect of forcing musicians not to rely so much on the printed page. They have no choice but to listen to each other. 

What to do? There's no quick fix. The answer is to retrain yourself to tunnel in on tempo instead of notes. This way the ensemble stays together without slowing down. The trade off is perhaps a lot of missed notes, but that's not as noticeable as you might think.

Here are my suggestions to get started:

• Get Time Guru. Use it. Standard metronomes are a crutch. You need an intermittent metronome that will train you to internalize tempo.
  • ​Make a simple game out of it. Set a tempo and see how much the app can omit without you getting off track.
  • While using Time Guru, play material just a bit faster than you can handle. Learn to recognize when you need to drop out. Come back in when you're ready. 
• Get in the habit of previewing your material. Scan the tune ahead of time, and read ahead 1-2 measures as you play.

And there it is. Simple, but not easy.

Now go practice.

How a Billionaire Investor Made Me a Better Musician

This isn't Charlie Munger.
It's only a model.

Charlie Munger never gave me one red cent. He never hired me for a gig. I've never even met the man, but he's given me the secret to become a better musician, and it has nothing to do with money. His real wealth is the wisdom he shares with anyone who'll listen. I listened and got a whole lot smarter about music. 

Our everyday world is complex. Mind-bogglingly so. Your head would explode if you didn't have a way to simplify the massive flow of data your mind receives. That's what mental models are for, and Charlie Munger is darn good at identifying and analyzing them. So what's a mental model? It's just a convenient way to explain to yourself how things work and anticipate what's next. The problem lies in the name. It's mental, and it's only a model, which makes only a partial reflection of reality. Relying on a badly constructed model land you in trouble, but so too will a reliance on too few models. A composite of many viewpoints will give you a better picture of reality. Remember the story of the blind men examining an elephant?

Reading and performing music is complex to say the least. We've all had the experience of being stuck. Maybe you're stumped on a weird rhythm or can't find the right phrasing. It's frustrating because you know the problem isn't physical. You're able to play it, but you haven't figured out how. The way out is to have multiple mental models at your disposal. Attack it from another viewpoint. Reframe the problem, or invert it. Consider alternatives or additional factors that might be causing the problem. Think outside the box, inside the box, or think laterally. 

Shhh!

As an example, I kept chipping a particular note on my horn. In my mind, chipped notes = bad attack, so I tried using different tonguing, faster air, slower air, etc. to fix it. Nothing worked. Turns out it was a tuning issue.  I had my slide too far in (sharp), and I unconsciously tried to lip it flatter, ruining the attack. In its correct slide position, the note came out clean every time. My real problem wasn't articulation or tuning at all. My mental model of how to make clean attacks was wrong. 

You can pick up more mental models by picking the brains of others. Find out how different people approach the same problem. Ask them directly if you can. Use books and videos if you can't. In short, use anything at your disposal. That's much better than hammering away with a familiar but unworkable approach. Or, as the saying goes in my day job, "Six months in the lab can save you an afternoon in the library." 

And don't forget to network, too. I fixed my chipped note problem by asking a fellow trombonist. He passed on the solution from his private teacher whom I've never met. Problem solved, and now have another mental model in my tool box. 

Hate to Practice? Eat a Bicycle Instead!

Monsieur Lotito liked his spokes al dente.

Eating a bicycle is serious business. Eating eighteen of them even more so. Michel Lotito (d. 2007) racked up an astonishing list of gastronomic feats including an entire Cessna 150. It took him two years to consume it! Anything this ambitious requires a good plan and a love of the process of eating bicycles. 

Speaking of processes, Nassim Nicholas Taleb remarks in Antifragile  "A friend who writes books remarked that painters like painting but authors like 'having written'. I suggested he stop writing, for his sake and the sake of his readers." His friend sure didn't like the practice of writing. I'll be it shows, too.

How could anyone like to practice? All those etudes, scales, and exercises over and over again. And don't forget the actual tunes. Are people who like to practice a bunch of obsessive crackpots? What's different about them? 

Answer: Their mindset. They've shifted their mental frame of reference. Practice isn't "fun" in the conventional sense, but there's a choice to make. It can be sheer drudgery, or it can be a reward unto itself. The difference is all in your approach, and it will make or break you in the long term.

Whet your appetite for practicing. Try these:

• Put down the horn and go read a couple books. Start with Carol Dweck's Mindset. Next try Thomas Sterner's The Practicing Mind for something specific to music. 

• Eat a bicycle. Better yet, eat your own horn. But not until you buy a new one first. Lotito never ate a musical instrument, so here's your chance to outshine him!

• Don't bite off more than you can chew. A young Lotito learned this the hard way after choking on the handlebars of his first bicycle.* Musicians don't have that kind of immediate feedback, so we tend to be too ambitious. Keep your practice sessions specific and bite-sized. You won't learn a lot of material this way during a practice session, but you will learn it well. To compensate for this narrow focus, you must...

• Be consistent! Lotito ate nine tons of metal by consuming just two pounds- every day. Likewise, you need to practice every day- don't break the chain! If you miss a practice day, try to limit it to just one. Two days off in a row is worse than two missed days spread out over a week.  

• Embrace repetition. Embrace repetition. Practice something until you're sick to death of it and bored out of your skull, then keep going. Get comfortable with the discomfort of this temporary phase. You'll force your mind to discover the infinite nuance and refinement that lies within. The boredom phase is actually an indicator of progress!

Size doesn't matter... does it?

Most of the time we're try to scale things bigger, overlooking the opposite direction. Like a fractal pattern, we can also go smaller to find ever finer details and nuance. George Leonard notes that people become masters through perfection of the art of practice. Savor the minute details of basic exercises. Be an obsessive perfectionist. Greatness proceeds through smallness. It's a paradox. And like a fractal, there's no way to tell which is 'great' and which is 'small'. Excellence is its own reward no matter the scale. 

*If you believe this, please contact me regarding a fabulous deal on Florida real estate. 

Sight-Reading: A Loser's Game

Did you know there's actually two different games called 'tennis'? That's what Simon Ramo explains in his Extraordinary Tennis for the Ordinary Player. Professional level tennis is a "winner's game", while amateur tennis is a "loser's game"*. Before you get too hot under the collar, let me explain what he means by this...

The outcome of a game is determined one of two ways. A "winner's game" is decided by who makes the greatest number of good moves. For tennis, the best example is an ace- a blistering serve that's virtually impossible to return. By contrast, a "loser's game" is decided by who makes the least number of avoidable, unforced errors. Most amateurs fall into this category, and they do so because:

• They believe themselves to be playing the "winner's game". They watch televised Grand Slam tournaments and try to make the same spectacular moves. 
• They haven't mastered the fundamentals and are generally happy to be what they deem is "good enough". In reality, they're stuck on the OK Plateau.

Ramo aims to transform you into an "ex-ordinary" tennis player. He explains the errors amateurs make and exercises to remedy them. Along the way, he also touches on the psychological meltdowns amateurs are subject to. One avoidable mistake is a botch, but what seals one's fate is a lack of skill to recover from it. Instead, hapless amateurs get flustered and tense. It leads directly to the "son-of-botch", which often perpetuates itself. Thus the meltdown.

Music isn't too different from tennis in this respect. I think there's only two types of music performance: 

• Prepared, thoroughly practiced material for concerts and recitals
• Sight-reading

Preparation of concert material is the result of much careful dissection and fine-grained deliberate practice. It's very specific to the material at hand. Audiences and critics judge these performances by their artistry and musicality. On the other hand, sight reading is what we amateur big band musicians do most of the time. Success is defined by how much we can minimize basic errors along the way. That's the definition of the loser's game. It could be something as basic as "start together, end together, and don't let the tempo drift apart in between". Much like Ramo's tennis players, we musicians confuse one game with the other and wind up all the worse for it. 

For the moment, we should accept that most of our material will be available only during rehearsal. If we can't take it home to practice, we're barely above the level of sight reading no matter how many times we've seen it. The best we can do is remember to take a snapshot of particularly hard parts with our smart phones, listen to recordings of the tune, and practice. It also doesn't hurt to become as familiar as possible with the type of music we're playing. 

*see here for an article about investing as a loser's game. 

How to be a Musical Precog

Sci-fi author Philip Dick often features 'precog' characters who predict the future. Pre-fash consultants in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch see upcoming fashion and decorating trends. In The Minority Report, precogs help apprehend criminals just before they commit their dirty deeds. 

"I have seen the future... it is a C7alt | Fmaj/min."

Precogs exist in real life too. Wayne Gretsky was a hockey precog, able to pass the puck to an empty spot where a teammate would be by the time the puck arrived. And of course we've all sat next to a musical precog. They can sight read anything without breaking a sweat. Their mistakes are few and subtle. It's like they can see the future of the music in just enough time to pull it off. The rest of us flop from one surprise to the next like fish out of water. Too bad for the rest of us that we weren't born with this precious psychic gift! All we can do is watch with awe and envy.

But what if it's not an inborn ability at all? What if musical precogs are good at a few critical skills that others overlook? What if those skills aren't any more difficult to master? Magicians and illusionists are notoriously guarded about divulging their secrets, but there's good news for musicians. You too can be a musical precog! It's a three step process, and you can get started right now. 

Step One: Chunking

Everything's better chunky!

Most of us have pretty average working memories that can hold no more than seven items at a time. You probably can't improve its size, but you can improve its efficiency by chunking. World-class memory champions like Josh Foer (author of Moonwalking with Einstein) get around this built-in limitation. Just use clever, highly personalized system to chunk larger pieces of information together. As musicians, we already have many chunks pre-made for us. We just have to recognize and practice them. Here they are:

• • Scales and arpeggios in every variety, key, and mode.
  • Use publications like this, this, this, this, and this to start chunking everything from common rhythmic patterns, harmonic progressions, and stylistic interpretation. 

When you can chunk a lot of what you're playing, cognitive load lessens. You can pay more attention to reading ahead (e.g., expanding eye-hand span) and improving ensemble playing. 

Step Two: Manage Your Reactions

Disasters don't happen when you make a mistake. They happen when you make a mistake and get upset. That leads to more mistakes, which makes you more upset, etc. This vicious circle is described by Simon Ramo in Extraordinary Tennis for the Ordinary Player as the 'botch' and 'son-of-botch'. The latter is by far more dangerous. Josh Waitzkin describes it in The Art of Learning as applied to martial arts and chess. Music is no different! 

...to getting all the notes.

For amateur musicians, the 'botch' is usually trying to get all the notes instead of keeping to the tempo. No amount of chunking can make up for this. Dwelling on missed notes will vaporize any cognitive surplus. You're now a prime target for the 'son-of botch' that comes from feeling pressured, rushed, and jittery. Unless you can quickly snap out it, your mistakes will escalate out of control. Better to avoid it altogether, especially when sight-reading. Gauge your playing instead by how well you keep the tempo and rhythm coordinated to the rest of the ensemble. You don't have a second chance to play a missed note, and trying will only cause problems for everyone.

Step Three: Pre-Flight Checklist

See my previous post on this topic. The pre-flight checklist gives you an added advantage when you can anticipate problem spots. 'Nuff said. 

Hunting the Invisible Gorilla

I'm invisible! You can't seeeeeee me!

What can a Nobel prize winning psychologist can teach you about music? A boatload! Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow explains how ensemble train wrecks happen and how they can be avoided. Sounds ridiculous? Read on...

Of Two Minds: System 1 & System 2

Kahneman divides our mind into two parallel but separate systems. Most of the time we're using the efficient and automatic System 1. It runs the background and has a heuristic for most everything. If System 1 comes up empty, then the slow and deliberative System 2 kicks in. Sometimes it also double-checks System 1's answers to make sure we're not doing something stupid. Most importantly for us, System 2 can be used to program System 1. Scott Adams refers to this as the 'moist robot' idea. It's what deliberate practice is all about. 

Asleep at the Switch: How Systems 1 & 2 Fail

System 1 isn't perfect. Its automatic programs are prone to illusions and fallacies. System 2 isn't perfect either. It won't double-check System 1 if it's lazy, misguided, or uninformed, but it will tell System 1 that everything looks good anyway. Just ask Ron Burgundy how that happens. The worst case is when System 2 incorrectly programs System 1. We'll run into the same problem over and over but not know how to fix it. We might not be aware that there's a problem at all. At least not our problem. It's usually easier to blame someone else. 

The granddaddy of illusions is WYSIATI- What You See Is All There Is. A lazy System 2 takes in all easily available information, declares it to be comprehensive, and presents it to System 1 for action. There are two problems with this. Firstly, the most important information often isn't immediately obvious or available. Secondly, if important information becomes available later, it might be ignored. System 2 already decided that it knows everything. 

No room for tempo, says System 2.

Kahneman compares an overloaded System 2 with an overloaded electrical circuit breaker. While the breaker completely shuts down everything it serves all at once, System 2 selectively shuts down attention to low-priority items. Under cognitive load, low priority items simply vanish. The devilish part is one isn't aware that they've vanished. Metacognition goes right out the window. The famous 'Invisible Gorilla' experiment is an illustration of this. It works just as well on Ph.D. psychologists as the rest of us. Try it on yourself here. 

Why Tempo Drifts Apart

Ensemble trainwrecks happen when we combine all of the above: WYSIATI, the Invisible Gorilla effect, and a misprogrammed System 2.  Look at sheet music and you see lots of notes. Tempo is mentioned just once at the beginning, so it's easy to overlook. Because of WYSIATI, our natural inclination is to prioritize notes over tempo, even though good ensemble playing requires the opposite. When the band hits a trouble spot, a misprogrammed System 2 says get all the notes!  and attention to tempo winks out of existence. A train wreck is all but certain at this point. 

It won't help much to point out who got so badly off tempo. They'll have trouble believing you. Everything was fine from their point of view. So maybe the band tries again at a slower tempo. Then everybody can focus extra hard on... getting all the notes, which won't fix anything. Lather, rinse, and repeat until the band is hopeless mash of sad mediocrity. 

Remember the post about the Cooper color codes? That's my way to help System 2 disengage from the less important stuff in order to save coordinated tempo. However, that won't work if you haven't got your priorities straight. If you've misprogrammed yourself to put notes first and tempo second, you've got some work to do. But don't fret! It's easier than ever to work on this when you have apps like Time Guru or Time Trainer to help you out. It'll feel difficult and uncomfortable at first, but with practice you'll begin to prefer keeping the tempo rather than getting all the notes. In fact, you'll wonder how you ever thought it about it any other way. That's something Kahneman talks about too in Part V of his book. It's only $2.99 for the Kindle version! Well worth a good read! 

Beyond Raph & Holmquist

While books by Raph and Holmquist are excellent at explicitly spelling out the assumed knowledge for the dance/swing/jazz/big band musician, there's a critical item they omit. It's assumed knowledge of an even more fundamental character, without which everything they wrote is utterly useless. Here it is:

Coordinated tempo is absolutely necessary for ensemble playing.

Let's unpack that statement. 

• Tempo need not be steady, only coordinated.
• Most music, most of the time uses a single constant tempo, which is the simplest tempo to coordinate.
• • Therefore everyone must individually be able to keep a steady tempo without an external aid (metronome, drummer, or conductor).

Most 'train wrecks' are attributable to too many band members not having mastered this most basic of skills. By 'too many', I mean no more than 2-3 people in the whole band, and by 'mastered', I mean the rock-solid, stone-cold, unconscious ability to hold a steady tempo for at least 16-32 bars. This is very likely in a typical band of 15-17 members. 

Cognitive overload happens when you try to multitask- i.e., try to consciously process too much information at once. Although one might be able to keep a steady tempo, play scales and arpeggios forward and backward, navigate complex rhythms, etc., that doesn't mean it can be done all at once. In order to accomplish this, the basic skills have to be practiced to near mastery (unconscious competence). 

The fact that I often hear significant discoordination of tempo after only a few beats indicates two things to me: 1) This is a woefully neglected skill that most people would do well to improve; and 2) "Getting all the notes" is the #1 priority instead of steady/coordinated tempo. 

So that's where steady tempo went to...

I think many musicians don't take this ability seriously enough because assumed knowledge is by definition invisible. Maybe they equate that invisibility with unimportance, which is like saying air is unimportant for people or water is unimportant for fish. Our common system of notation is deceptive because it emphasizes pitches and rhythms because they're constantly changing and can't be assumed. Tempo, while the most salient of skills, is ironically invisible because it usually remains constant for the entire tune and doesn't need to be mentioned more than once. That's not an indication that it's unimportant, however. Quite the opposite.

So, what to do? The best exercises I've come up with to work on this skill are very simple and very cheap. They make practice and rehearsal time with the instrument more effective, and they can be done nearly anytime and anywhere since you don't need an instrument. An instrument adds unnecessary complexity, so you're better off without it at first. Crucially, these exercises give you immediate feedback and train you to keep time yourself, rather than follow an external stimulus like a traditional metronome.

• Use the 'tap' function available on metronome apps like Clockwork and Time Guru. How long can you sustain a given tempo? How much does it vary under or over your target tempo?
• Use Time Guru's random mute feature. How high a percentage of muted beats can you go without getting off track? 
• If you have jazz recordings that feature a drum solo that takes up at least one whole chorus, can you jump back in with the rest of the band when the drum solo is done?
• Now add the instrument. Play a scale while using Time Guru's random mute feature, going from root to 9th and back down again, over and over. Pick a tempo that's comfortable for you. How much of the tempo can you mute and still stay on track?  
• Do the same as above, but with increasingly complex music. Can you still stay on track with the tempo? 

If you're like most people who mistakenly try to "get all the notes", you'll feel very uncomfortable letting missed notes sail by while you try to keep a steady tempo. With practice this discomfort will fade and you'll see the benefit to committing to a steady tempo no matter what.

There's a parallel here to speed reading. One exercise is to simply move your eyes across the page in a set pattern at a constant tempo. It doesn't matter that you're not reading or understanding the words. Keeping a steady tempo of eye movements is the point. Over time one finds that comprehension slowly increases- the brain adapts to the faster scanning speed and finds a way to process the text at a faster speed. The point is: tempo first, comprehension second. The same applies to music: tempo first, notes second. 

It's something of a leap of faith, but there's no harm in trying. Playing an instrument isn't a dangerous or risky activity, so just try it first and think about it later. Don't talk yourself out of trying something that offers you a very limited and defined downside (a set amount of your time and effort) versus a potentially unlimited upside (making playing music for you a helluva lot easier, alone and especially in an ensemble).