Reinforcing Auditory Memory
Our memories are most robust and reliable when they are reinforced and enriched, over and over, in different ways. This is for two reasons. First, reinforced and enriched memories have more ways to be cued and connect to more kinds of meaning. Second, having different but associated ways of understanding music gives us different ways of thinking about it at different times. Your brain has several mechanisms for working with information and planning action in the moment, but they are all limited; if one mechanism is overloaded, a musician with multiple ways of thinking about music can rely on another. For example, if you are in an ensemble and preparing for your next entrance, your ability to imagine sound may be overwhelmed by the other sounds people are performing all around you, but you may be able to feel more ready for the entrance by imagining it through physical motion or solfège/scale degrees.
If you have played some instrument for many years, you may be able to make your internal image of sound more robust by either playing an “air” version of the instrument (for example, forming your fingers to hit the right keys on your saxophone or piano) or even just imagining playing the instrument. This type of reinforcement, called Instrument-based kinesthetic imagery, helps your sound-image connect with physical motion, giving you two different ways of understanding and encoding in memory.
One more method that can be useful is getting really familiar with solfège and scale degrees (as recommended in Chapter 3). The more you practice solfège, the more it will help you store, and think about, music in different, mutually-reinforcing ways.
In the end, if you have these ways of thinking about music, they can be just as powerful as the ability to hear realistic sounds in your head.
Activity: Responding to sound with a robust internal image
Goal: To hear a sound and quickly be able to map it to physical motions on an instrument and solfège.
Before you start: You’ll ideally want a group for this activity. It can work with voices or instruments or any combination, but will work best if everyone has access to an instrument on which they can track whole and half steps.
Instructions:
- Each member of the group silently comes up with a string of 3–5 notes that they can either sing or play on their instrument. The string of notes should all fit and make sense in a single key.
- One person performs their string of notes (twice if the string is hard to remember). Then the rest of the group takes a silent 30 seconds to do the next two steps. (If those steps are not working well, it may help to do them aloud with trial-and-error at first, but our goal is to eventually make them silent.)
- First, figure out how to play it back. If working on relative pitch, you may do so at any pitch level. If there are multiple people in the group, it may be useful for the first person to indicate the starting concert pitch so that everyone can work it