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). 

The Ron Burgundy Effect

Ron Burgundy has a weakness. He'll read anything that comes up on the teleprompter. Anything. Sometimes that gets him into trouble: 

He may have a suave, manly delivery, but his attention doesn't extend beyond the next few words. After all, it can't. The teleprompter doesn't allow him to look forward more than that. The hypnotic pull of droning whatever's in front of him is so strong that he's often not aware of how inappropriate his words were. He's flat oblivious to what he's saying. Sometimes his producer's apoplectic fit is Ron's only tip-off that he's stepped in it once again.

As musicians, we fall prey to the same effect when we narrow our attention to only the next few notes in front of us. Ensemble playing becomes hit-or-miss. Mostly miss. Under the sway of the Ron Burgundy Effect, we allow printed music to hoodwink us into ignoring:

• phrasing
• what the rest of our section is playing
• what other sections are playing
• how what we're playing fits in to what's happening overall
• the fact that we're playing music and not just notes.

Nobody said playing in an ensemble is easy. After all, it's an ensemble, not a bunch of individual musicians who happen to be playing in the same room at the same time. We have to constantly balance covering our own part with ensemble playing. If that means we let fumbled notes and phrases whiz by, so be it. It's better to drop them than make a mad scramble to play them. That's what causes the ensemble to crash and burn.

The mustache is no obstacle! 

The way out of this trap is not to fall into it. Don't let printed music become your teleprompter. When sight reading, use the pre-flight checklist. Scan ahead at every opportunity. Get a general idea of phrasing and spot anything that looks out of the ordinary. Familiar tunes can lull us into a false sense of security too. Look ahead for reminders of shifts in tempo, dynamics, and style. 

Ron Burgundy can use the teleprompter as an excuse, but you have advance warning. Take advantage of it, and your playing will improve!

Articulation, pt. II

There's more support out there for prioritizing steady tempo and good rhythm over getting all the notes- this time from the phenomenal Bob McChesney, the leading exponent of the 'doodle-tongue' technique for trombonists. (If you're a trombonist, you must immediately purchase and zealously practice his method book. Seriously.) One important point McChesney makes in this video is that for rapid passages, articulation trumps intonation. Our brains lock on to the attack of the note so strongly that minor intonation flaws aren't noticed. A lot of big band/jazz/swing music is up-tempo with lots of notes flying around, so there's a lot of relevance here. 

Not the doodle tongue I was thinking of.
But can he keep a steady tempo?

This brings me back to three previous posts on articulation, the obsessive fetish of 'get all the notes', and reliance on printed music. It might seem obvious that music is strictly an aural and temporal process. Obvious, that is, until you fall into the trap of over-reliance on printed music, which is only a spatial representation of the real thing. The musician's job is to convert those static printed blobs on the paper back into dynamic, audible sound energy. Come to think of it the term 'printed music' is something of an oxymoron. It's printed, all right, but it's not really music. 

If you still think tempo and rhythm are less important than getting all the notes, consider rap and hip-hop, which is music stripped to its essentials. There's barely any melody, harmony, phrasing, etc. yet it's still intelligible and recognizable as music. Why? Because tempo and rhythm are more important than getting all the notes! Now try to imagine the opposite- music with everything except tempo and rhythm. Inconceivable, right? That's the point.

 Mine eyes deceive me. Lend me your ears!

Articulation (attacks and releases) is the main tool we use to define tempo and rhythm.  A focus on good attacks and releases will compensate for missing a few notes here and there, but no amount of good intonation or note accuracy will fix the train wreck caused by reversing these priorities. This fits in with Matts Holmquist's point when he writes about sound envelopes (the 'brick' vs. the 'anthill'). 

Shake off the hypnotic lure of sheet music!  Take your eyes off of it as much as you can. You can even do this while sight reading! If it helps, imagine there's a gorgon hiding right behind your music stand, and she'll pop out at any second and turn you to stone.

Less eyes, more ears. It only seems obvious. 

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Written Music: Anti-Ear Training

Check out this short video of Bill Watrous talking about his brief stint in the Ellington band:





He was "scared out of his shorts" because the majority of tunes the Ellington band was playing had no written parts. At best there was a 'head chart' that had a basic outline of what was to be played. As Watrous says, this was de riguer for many bands in that era, all the way back to Sousa.

Consider that bands like Ellington's were a primary source of entertainment in those days. No internet and no television. Radio and phonographs (in that era) didn't have nearly the sound quality of a CD or even a cassette tape. If you weren't playing it yourself, you were listening to someone else play it- live! It was reasonable for bands to protect themselves against the competition getting access to their charts, thus allowing them to play exactly the same thing. The 'head chart' was just a memory aid for performers, who had already worked out among themselves all the dynamics, articulations, phrasing, etc. Watrous says that sometimes even what was on the bare-bones written charts was deliberately played differently! Every band developed its own unique style this way.

As a consequence of this practice, musicians had to possess keen listening skills to play well as an ensemble. This normally wasn't a problem because band members had enough time to work it out and memorize their parts. Not so for Bill Watrous- he had to come in on short notice and quickly figure out everything without any written part at all. At the time, nobody really knew just where the printed 'head chart' was! Lucky for him somebody found it and also talked him through the tunes, or he would've crashed and burned pretty hard.

Fully written out parts are a double-edged sword. For all its benefits, it does us a disservice because we have the choice not to listen to each other. I also think there can be too much information crammed on the page as well: notes, dynamics, articulations, phrasing suggestions, tempo markings, etc. It's easy to bury your head in the written page and mistake the map for the territory. Too much mental bandwidth is used for visually processing the written music, and it comes at the expense of aurally processing what's going on all around us.

Just keep looking at the page, boy...
 Yessss, ignore those other sounds...

Given this, it's no wonder that so many of us in amateur bands routinely experience individuals or even whole sections who completely ignore that they've veered badly off track or have tuning issues that threaten to shake the fillings right out of your teeth. The seductive draw of the written page functions as a kind of ear training in reverse!


I'd like to experiment with a return to head charts- just a tune or two here and there. Maybe use them as a warm-up tool. Anybody out there know of bands that do this? Put it in the comments!

Notes, Schmotes! Keep a Steady Tempo!

How many times has this happened in your band... Musicians stumble over a tricky passage, and the beat lurches, bucks, and heaves until it settles on a new tempo much slower than before. Hit another tricky passage and the process repeats itself. What started as an up-tempo dance tune becomes a funeral dirge by the end. 

I blame it all on sheet music.

Sheet music is a necessary evil. We need it because it's not practical to memorize dozens of charts, and it's evil because there's a powerful temptation to mistake the map for the territory, wrecking the music in the process. Allow me to explain...

Consider the feat that musicians are required to perform: Transform information encoded by matter in physical space (black blobs printed on a sheet of paper) to information encoded by energy in time (the sound waves the audience experiences). It's a lot like a Fourier transform, if you're mathematically inclined. Your job as a musician is to make that translation happen. 

The important thing to remember is that your audience doesn't experience the printed page. It experiences your transformation of that page. But as musicians, our primary focus is that instruction sheet in front of us, which tempts us to forget that the product we're making from it is what counts, not the instruction sheet itself. You eat the food, not the recipe. 

Here's another analogy:

Imagine experiencing a You Tube clip using an internet connection that's a little too slow. What would you rather watch? A clip that maintains a normal playback speed while reducing video and audio resolution as necessary, or a clip that maintains high video and audio resolution while slowing down (or even stopping) its playback speed as necessary? Nearly everyone prefers the former, and that's just what You Tube does to cope with slow connections. Detail is sacrificed in order to maintain a steady tempo. 

Playing a tune using sheet music is virtually the same thing. We must keep a steady tempo at all costs even if we have to sacrifice the details of notes, rhythms, dynamics, articulations, and phrasing. Nothing is more important than tempo! As I wrote before, physically disengage from your instrument if you need to, but remain mentally engaged and follow along in good time until you can jump back in. 

As Yogi Berra said about baseball, "90% of the game is half mental." Likewise, most of what we do as musicians is a mental process. Let's redefine 'playing music' as doing as much as you can of the list below*, but no more. It's additive, so each step incorporates everything from the previous steps. Do as much of it as you can, and don't do something on the list if you're not already doing everything above it. Note how much is mental and how much is physical:

• Keeping good time requires only mental engagement. No instrument required. 
• Keeping good rhythm might involve minimal physical involvement (chanting/clapping/tapping). Still no instrument.
• Throw in phrasing and dynamics. Still minimal physical involvement (varying how hard you're chanting/clapping/tapping). Still no instrument. 
• The mechanics of good articulation are specific to your instrument, so only now is an actual instrument required, but the right notes still aren't. You can use just one note or even random notes instead.
• LASTLY- Add the right notes. 

If you define 'playing music' as 'notes coming out the horn', you're taking the lowest priority item on the list and making it the highest. Like a house with a bad foundation, the whole structure soon collapses. Keeping good time has to come first, and getting the notes last. Especially in ensembles, chaos ensues when those priorities are switched around because no two people will slow down the tempo at the same time in the same way, so there's multiple competing tempos. That's the bucking and lurching bit I mentioned before. 

You Play How You Practice

Many people have the bad habit of slowing down or even stopping when they miss notes while practicing at home. Because it's a habit, you can't turn this behavior off like a switch when you come to rehearsal. Slowing down or stopping while playing alone is mostly harmless, but it's deadly to ensemble playing. Since you'll play in rehearsal just like you practice at home, break yourself of this habit as soon as you can. Maybe it should be your #1 priority! Use a metronome or a play-along track and practice not slowing down or stopping no matter what. Pick a short exercise, tune, or excerpt so you don't overwhelm yourself or get discouraged at first. Be patient with yourself and remember that changing habits takes time and patience. Becoming comfortable letting missed notes and rhythms sail by is a great skill to have. It helps develop your ear, and it'll help you fix the problems that led to you missing those notes and rhythms to begin with.  

To summarize, stop throwing the music under the bus of get all the notes all the time. Do exactly the opposite! You and your band will be a lot better off!

*I didn't include on this list the process of sight-singing the notes, which could be added in early on since that too is a purely mental process. Doing this requires some ear training, which is always good to practice. Check out Jamey Aebersold's Jazz Ear Training for that.