When you see an incredible musician – are you inspired? Or are you intimidated? Believe it or not, this reaction is not something that happens to you – it’s something entirely within your control, and flipping from one to the other can have a massive positive effect on your musical life. musicalitypodcast.com/197
Links and Resources
The Truth About Talent, with Professor Anders Ericsson – http://musicalitypodcast.com/62
Do You Have An “Inner Natural Musician”? Here’s How To Know – http://musicalitypodcast.com/182
If you enjoy the show please rate and review it! http://musicalitypodcast.com/review
Join Musical U with the Special offer for podcast listeners http://musicalitypodcast.com/join
Let us know what you think! Email: hello@musicalitypodcast.com
When you see an incredible musician – are you inspired? Or are you intimidated?
Believe it or not, this reaction is not something that happens to you – it’s something entirely within your control, and flipping from one to the other can have a massive positive effect on your musical life.
Hi, my name’s Christopher, I’m the founder of Musical U, and welcome to Musicality Now.
Recently I had an email from a podcast listener named Maria in Sweden, who said:
“I really appreciate your attitude of trying to make everyone feel like they are musical. I think it should be a human right to have time and means to express oneself musically!
However I feel that you tend to interview people that I label as over-achievers. Maybe it’s inspirational for some but for me it’s kind of exhausting and I can’t really relate.”
I totally understand. I hear that and I think it would be awesome to feature more non-expert interviews. We’ve shared some case studies from our Foundations course in the past, but we can definitely try to share more stories from musicians that all of you in the audience can relate more directly to.
But there’s a bigger point here, and that’s what made me want to pick up on it in this episode.
This isn’t just about podcast interviews. I don’t want to speak for Maria, but I know that for me, this feeling of being exhausted by apparent over-achievers was something that happened throughout my musical life.
For a long time in music when I saw someone amazing perform or I talked with a musician who was way ahead of me in terms of skills I felt totally intimidated.
Or, to put it another way, I felt really inferior. It suddenly made me highly conscious of everything I couldn’t do, and I’d come away impressed – but also disheartened.
What I gradually figured out and what I wanted to share with you today is that in that moment when you feel intimidated by an amazing musician, there’s a choice available to you.
We tend to see intimidation as something external which happens to us:
“That person makes me feel intimidated”
“That person has an intimidatingly impressive level of skill”
“When I see what they do it makes me feel like I could never do that”.
But the actual facts of the situation can be interpreted in an entirely different way, if you choose to. It may be a fact that they can do things you can’t, like improvising or playing by ear, or performing with total confidence and a moving level of musical expression. But that’s the only fact. Everything that happens inside you after that is up to you.
Because the alternative interpretation is “Wow, they can do that. That thing is possible. It could be possible for me too.”
In other words: inspiration, rather than intimidation.
Now I appreciate that this may not seem easy! We have an automatic mental and emotional reaction of intimidation, it happens without us consciously choosing it. But from right now on, you have an opportunity to change that. Because all it takes is becoming aware of that reaction and remembering “I have a choice here”. Once you do that, you can immediately shake off any thoughts of unworthiness or what you might be lacking, and instead reframe it as something inspiring you might choose to aspire to in future.
Why is it that so many of us fall into this trap, of automatically interpreting impressive musicians as intimidating rather than inspiring? I think there are a few reasons.
Firstly, it’s a byproduct of our cultural ideas about musical “talent”. We’ve covered that a lot on this show before and I’ll put links in the shownotes if you’re in any doubt – but suffice to say: we’ve been fooled into thinking that some people are gifted in music and others are not. And most of us put ourselves in that second camp and go through our musical lives continually feeling inferior to those we perceive as gifted.
Clearly that’s a recipe for exactly this reaction of being intimidated rather than inspired – because those people seem like the gifted aliens that we could never hope to be like.
If you get 100% clear on the talent myth and its implications for your musical life you’ll find it much easier when those moments arise to choose inspiration rather than intimidation.
The second reason we get into feeling intimidated is, funnily enough, almost the opposite – but somehow the two coexist in our minds. It’s that we see that that person is a human like us, and we compare ourselves to them and some part of us feels like we should be able to do whatever they can, so we feel disappointed and frustrated that we can’t.
We’re essentially treating those amazing musicians as our peers and then judging ourselves against their example. If we can’t do what they can do we feel we judge ourselves to be lacking.
The key here is to surround yourself with the right peer group. That’s why we place such a big emphasis on community at Musical U – not so we can sit around chit-chatting on social media all day, but because when you see people who are genuinely like you and at a similar stage or just a step or two ahead, it’s dramatically easier to feel inspired by their success rather than getting into intimidation.
It’s why you’ll never find any hero-worship here at Musical U, why we don’t issue certificates or take any kind of elitist attitude. As Maria said, we’re all about inclusivity. And it’s because when passionate adult musicians are surrounded by others who like them are working on their musicality, amazing things come of it. One thing I particularly love is when a member will comment on how they signed up really not expecting to get anything out of the community side of membership – but they’ve realised just how big an impact it can have on their motivation and their results.
It really does matter who you surround yourself with, and when you get this right, you’ll find that you have such a solid base of inspiration around you, the cases where a stand-out musician would otherwise have intimidated you – you’ll find that those too just become really inspiring and exciting.
The final reason we tend to get into feeling intimidated when we see an impressive musician is that when it comes to learning and assessing our progress most of us default to looking ahead to the goal and judging ourselves by how far off it is. But again, the actual facts at play allow for a completely different interpretation: we can always choose to instead measure ourselves by how far we’ve come and the progress we have made. The impressive musician and our own personal goal can still be something to think of and aim for – but we only judge ourselves based on our own progress forwards.
This mental judo-flip lets you instantly turn intimidation into inspiration by separating “that person is great” from the “therefore I am not great” – and instead letting “that person is great” co-exist with “I’ve really been improving” and even “one day I’ll be great”.
Like I said, this was something I discovered gradually and I had to practice a bit. And the more I understood that apparent “talent” was all coming from learnable skills, the more I surrounded myself by my true peers and saw what was possible at my level and just a few steps above, and the more I remembered to measure myself by my progress from the start instead of my distance from the goal – the easier it was to stay out of intimidation and benefit from all the amazing inspiration available to us in the world of music.
So take this away into your musical life: next time you see or hear something amazing and you feel any twinge of intimidation, pause a moment. Remember you have a choice of how to respond. Remind yourself that whatever they can do is learnable for you too, remind yourself of your true peers, remind yourself of all your progress you’ve made so far. And enjoy the experience as a fresh moment of inspiration to propel you even further forwards.
Hi, I’m Christopher, the founder and Director of Musical U, and welcome to Musicality Now.
Recently I had cause to go back to the very first interview we did here on Musicality Now – or “The Musicality Podcast” as it was then. It was with Natalie Weber of the highly-popular Music Matters Blog, and she shared this wonderful analogy that has always stuck in my head since then.
It was a story from a book, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank in which a teacher was talking to their student. And I’m going to paraphrase Natalie’s telling of the story so it may not be true to that original book! But I think the point comes through clearly.
The student is asking the teacher why they have to bother with all these drills and exercises instead of doing the interesting, fun, creative work. And the teacher explains how Leonardo da Vinci didn’t just spend his life following inspiration and drawing whatever he was moved to draw. He became one of the greatest artists of all time through extensive practice of drawing the raw component pieces. Individual body parts – arms, legs, heads – from a variety of angles. Honing his ability to accurately capture those building blocks. So that when inspiration struck, his work on this “codex” of body parts meant he could directly express the creative vision with great artistry and skill.
The point being: the tedious legwork of honing your technical skills is what empowers you to feel free and creative and produce great art.
And this goes way beyond the simplification which may be springing into your mind, of “you need to work hard to achieve things”. It’s more subtle than that.
In our conversation Natalie was mentioning this in reference to how ear training exercises and drills can be the raw material that empowers you to play by ear or improvise. So even though we might shy away from those abstract drills in favour of more applied creative exercises, there’s great value in putting in that foundational skill work.
But what I wanted to share today is what we went on to discuss, which is that there’s a balance to be found… A “sweet spot” between technical proficiency on your instrument and the creative practices that may be what inspire you to play the instrument in the first place.
Here at Musical U we often talk about the “trifecta” of instrument skills, music theory, and ear training. How the three together are what create a competent and confident musician who feels empowered to do whatever they want to in music. And how traditional music education typically focuses almost exclusively on instrument skills, tries to persuade the student to study a bit of music theory “because they should” and often completely neglects the ear skills.
A large part of the purpose of musicality training is to rebalance that triangle and bring the ear skills and conceptual understanding of music up to par with the instrument skills, which lets you go from a note-playing robot to a free, creative and expressive player.
But here’s the thing: you can go too far in the other direction too! I’ve been guilty of this myself and I think that’s why this story in Natalie’s interview resonated with me and made me want to share it with you today.
Because when we talk about musicality training, we aren’t for a second saying that instrument technique doesn’t matter.
And there have certainly been times in my musical life when I’ve focused too much on the theory and felt like “Okay, I understand that, let’s move on” – without pausing to ask if I could actually do anything with that newfound understanding.
And there have been plenty of times, including at the moment when I’ve focused almost exclusively on musicality training – and my instrument chops have got pretty rusty, so that when I come to apply my shiny new ear skills in creative ways I find my fingers aren’t quite up to the task!
So I wanted to share (or perhaps remind you, if you’ve heard Natalie’s full interview) of this concept of “the codex and creativity”. And however that model applies in your own musical life, prompt you to ask yourself: do I have the right balance? Am I in the sweet spot between doing the nitty-gritty technical exercises to level up my core skills and doing the more free, creative, applied practices that put them all to use?
And one last thought – this isn’t black-and-white, either/or. Finding that sweet spot isn’t just about doing some of one and some of the other. It can also look like finding ways to develop those core skills in interesting, creative and musical ways. That’s what we do with the song-based learning in our Foundations course, it’s what we do with our Learn/Practice/Apply framework inside Musical U membership. And you’ll hear it coming through in past episodes of this show about improving and enjoying, about getting started improvising, and about bringing out your inner musicality.
So how can you know if you’re in the sweet spot?
Well, it’s pretty simple, and it comes back to that past podcast episode. Are you enjoying and improving? If you aren’t enjoying, chances are you’re weighing yourself down with too many dull, abstract exercises, doing your duty but inevitably losing motivation and momentum. If you aren’t improving, chances are you’re spending too much time applying your skills for fun music-making but without balancing it with the core skill work, or doing the creative practices in a way that develops those core skills effectively along the way.
So look out for those two warning signs, ask yourself “am I in the sweet spot?” and find your own balance between codex and creativity.
We’re joined by Dr. Josh Turknett, the neurologist, best-selling author and musician behind “Brainjo” – a music-learning methodology which originated on banjo but applies across all instruments, and which is designed to leverage modern scientific insights on how the brain actually learns.
At the Brainjo Center for Neurology & Cognitive Enhancement Josh tackles the question “Is it possible to take any ordinary adult brain and turn it into the brain of a musician?” – and finds strong evidence that the answer is a resounding “Yes!” http://musicalitypodcast.com/195
He is also the host of the terrific Intelligence Unshackled Podcast, which focuses on how to optimise the health and function of the brain, including its capacity to learn and change itself.
If you’ve ever wondered how exactly the brain learns new things, or whether your music-learning process is really dialed in to help you learn as quickly and enjoyably as possible – you are going to absolutely love this one.
In this conversation Josh shares:
– A completely new way to think about how you’re spending your music practice time
– An explanation of how to use visualisation to help you improve faster – and when exactly to do that visualisation.
– The “labyrinth technique” to focus your practice time on what will deliver the biggest impact.
We also talk about how playing by ear on banjo is – and isn’t – different from other instruments, how playing complex music by ear actually works, how the adult brain compares to the child’s brain for learning – and a whole lot more.
You will come away with several new ideas that change how you think about your music learning.
Watch the episode: http://musicalitypodcast.com/195
Links and Resources
The Immutable Laws of Brainjo : http://lawsofbrainjo.com/
The Immutable Laws of Brainjo – Why Anyone Can (and should!) Learn To Play By Ear : https://clawhammerbanjo.net/episode-28-why-anyone-can-and-should-learn-to-play-by-ear-part-1/
The Immutable Laws of Brainjo – The Secret To Staying Motivated : https://clawhammerbanjo.net/the-immutable-laws-of-brainjo-the-art-and-science-of-effective-practice-episode-8/
The Immutable Laws of Brainjo – The Advantages of Having an Adult Brain : https://clawhammerbanjo.net/the-advantages-of-having-an-adult-brain-laws-of-brainjo-episode-25/
The Immutable Laws of Brainjo – The Most Important Skill You Probably Never Practice : https://clawhammerbanjo.net/episode-32-the-most-important-skill-you-probably-never-practice/
Intelligence Unshackled – Why You Should Embrace Your Ineptitude : https://elitecognition.com/inept/
David Epstein – “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World” : https://www.amazon.com/Range-Generalists-Triumph-Specialized-World/dp/0735214484/ref=sr_1_1?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIib-amOvd4wIV8ZFbCh0y0wglEAAYASAAEgJLmPD_BwE&hvadid=321983913261&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=9023531&hvnetw=g&hvpos=1t1&hvqmt=e&hvrand=536145931203285061&hvtargid=kwd-656818571687&hydadcr=22538_9636739&keywords=range+david+epstein&qid=1564530743&s=books&sr=1-1
If you enjoy the show please rate and review it! http://musicalitypodcast.com/review
Join Musical U with the Special offer for podcast listeners http://musicalitypodcast.com/join
Let us know what you think! Email: hello@musicalitypodcast.com
Today’s interview is among the most fascinating we’ve had on the show to date. We’re joined by Dr. Josh Turknett, the neurologist, best-selling author and musician behind “Brainjo” – a music-learning methodology which originated on banjo but applies across all instruments, and which is designed to leverage modern scientific insights on how the brain actually learns.
At the Brainjo Center for Neurology & Cognitive Enhancement Josh tackles the question “Is it possible to take any ordinary adult brain and turn it into the brain of a musician?” – and finds strong evidence that the answer is a resounding “Yes!”
He is also the host of the terrific Intelligence Unshackled Podcast, which focuses on how to optimise the health and function of the brain, including its capacity to learn and change itself.
If you’ve ever wondered how exactly the brain learns new things, or whether your music-learning process is really dialed in to help you learn as quickly and enjoyably as possible – you are going to absolutely love this one.
In this conversation Josh shares:
A completely new way to think about how you’re spending your music practice time
An explanation of how to use visualisation to help you improve faster – and when exactly to do that visualisation.
The “labyrinth technique” to focus your practice time on what will deliver the biggest impact.
We also talk about how playing by ear on banjo is – and isn’t – different from other instruments, how playing complex music by ear actually works, how the adult brain compares to the child’s brain for learning – and a whole lot more.
You will come away with several new ideas that change how you think about your music learning.
Josh: Hi. This is Dr. Josh Turknett, Founder of Brainjo. Welcome to Musicality Now.
Christopher: Welcome to the show, Josh. Thank you for joining us today.
Josh: Thank you for having me, Christopher.
Christopher: You are the most fascinating blend of musician and brain scientist that I’ve come across in a while, and I have to say, as I look through your websites for Brainjo and the Brainjo Center, I was just continually saying, “This is so cool.”
Josh: Thank you.
Christopher: I’ve really been looking forward to this and the chance to unpack some of the topics you cover at Brainjo and the methodology you bring to music learning. But, you are a musician, as I said, as well as a brain scientist and an avid student of all the latest in learning theory and brain development. I’d love if we can begin with your musical backstory, if we may, and what got you into music in the first place and what that looked like.
Josh: Sure. I’ve been interested in music for as long as I can remember, probably like most human beings, and first, initially, through singing. My earliest memories are going out on my swing set and singing the songs, my favorite songs of the day. It had to have been I was three or four years old. First, through singing, and then I grew up in the era when the keyboards were hitting the market, you know? The Casios and things like that. My brother and I had one that we liked to mess around on, and that was the first time that I’d played an instrument, so to speak, and it was also the first time that I’d ever done anything like trying to play by ear other than trying to sing by ear. That was kind of the first, early exposure to playing.
Josh: I wanted to do more. I really wanted to become a better keyboard player or a better piano player. I kind of wanted to be able to play the songs that I heard on the radio, right? Figure out how to make that music myself. I knew from my experience that the ability to play by ear was possible, right? We could pick out little melodies on the keyboard, but I didn’t really know where to go from there. I didn’t know what steps to take to go from the music that I could do there to playing something fully formed, that sounded more complete and comprehensive.
Josh: The only thing that was really available in terms of instruction was people teaching to learn to read sheet music, to learn by rote, the classical music approach. A couple different times, took lessons where that was the approach, and it wasn’t the thing I wanted to learn, so it didn’t really click with me. I was able to play some songs and stuff, but I was still looking for someone to kind of show me the path towards what playing by ear would look like, because it felt very different. It was a very different way of making music. The by rote approach kind of took a lot of the fun out of it for me.
Josh: But it was still, back then, even this idea around, and it’s still pervasive, but it was even more so back then, because we didn’t have the internet. You didn’t have other exposures, so there was this idea that you people out there who were born with this ability to learn by ear, right? It was just like they just walked up to a piano and they just played everything they heard. It would just happen by magic, right? And there was nothing in between. It was this idea that you either were born with that capacity or not, and there was really nowhere to go to learn how to do that sort of thing.
Josh: So, I kind of resigned myself to that idea for a while. Would still mess around on the piano some, but kind of like put it aside for a while. Then it wasn’t until I was in, let’s say, I think my last year of medical school where I got a guitar and just getting the guitar and learning chords, where the guitar tradition, at that point in time, there was the internet. I was able to get some access to some instructional materials. There was enough there that I could sort of start figuring that out by ear, just learning chords, learning to play and sing along.
Josh: That got me completely excited about playing music again. It felt like I kind of understood, then, where I could go from there to play the kind of music that I wanted to play. So, messed around on the guitar. Learned strumming and singing styles, learned to play flat pick, bluegrass style, and then moved into playing some country blues finger picking. Then, one fateful Christmas, I was given a banjo by my family, who I’d expressed an interest for quite some time that one day I would like to learn how to play the banjo, so my brother was the instigator who ended up getting it for me, and really fell in love with the banjo as an instrument.
Josh: Then, was hooked on that, learned several different styles of banjo. Since then, it’s been learning other instruments, fiddle, going back to piano. As I figured out things about how to learn to play by ear, how to make my own music, went back to these other instruments that I’d tried to learn on before and applied those same concepts and made the kind of progress that I’d hoped to make so many years ago.
Josh: So, that’s kind of my journey in a nutshell. Also, a lot of what I’m doing now with Brainjo is kind of reaching back to try to solve some of the problems that I’d faced long ago and demystify a lot of the stuff around learning by ear, providing pathways for people to do it, make it not so intimidating. We’re all, as I think you guys feel as well, we’re all wired to make music. It’s just trying to figure out how to tap into that best and giving people ways to do that.
Christopher: Awesome. I’m always conscious that whatever episode we’re doing might be the first episode anyone’s tuned into. Like someone listening, it might be their first episode. A moment ago when you talked about the idea, back when you were growing up, that playing by ear was an all or nothing gift, you and I have a shared understanding that that’s not reality, and we can a talk a lot more about that, but if someone’s listening and they’re like, “Wait, but isn’t that the case?” If they’ve never come across this idea that actually that’s not how playing by ear works, could you just explain in a nutshell why it isn’t that magical gift, or maybe why we ended up with that cultural assumption that it was, too?
Josh: Yeah. It’s interesting. Why we ended up with that is a good question. You’re right, that I, We kind of take for granted that people realize that it’s not this all or nothing thing nowadays, because it’s not true. I was at dinner with someone just the other night who said that very thing. We were having this conversation about it, it’s all or nothing. So, probably one of the most important points to make about it is that it is a learned skill, like any other part of playing music. Just like playing a scale or learning how to fret a chord or whatever. Playing by ear is a skill that can be developed.
Josh: Part of that is having a road map. How do you get from a starting point to being able to pick out songs by ear? One of the articles that I’ve written about on the topic talks about that in terms of what you need and the raw materials that you need to be able to play by ear, it’s basically just being able to match a pitch that exists outside of you to one internally. Almost everybody has that capacity. True tone deafness would be the absence of that ability, just like colorblindness, you can’t perceive certain colors. If you’re completely unable to perceive certain pitches, it makes learning by ear really tricky to learn as a skill. But that’s a really uncommon problem. Most folks who have it aren’t actually drawn to learning how to play music. Most people who are interested in playing music have the ability to discriminate pitches.
Josh: Also, if you can sing, you’re already doing that. All you’re doing when you sing is matching an internal pitch representation with what you’re producing with your vocal cords. And, even if you don’t sing well, if you recognize that you don’t sing well, then you also are matching internal pitches with what you can … So that’s a production problem, right? There are two things that you have to have in order to be able to sing on pitch, be able to recognize the pitch and being able to have the control over your vocal apparatus to match it. If you can either sing on pitch or recognize when you aren’t singing on pitch, then you have the apparatus. You’re not tone deaf. There are ways that you can formally test yourself for it.
Josh: But from there, it’s really a matter of having a sequence in terms of taking where you are at any point in time and then taking that to full on being able to play by ear, and there is a sequence, just like learning anything else. There’s a progression of skills that it takes to ultimately get to the higher levels that you’d want to be at. But yeah, it’s something that anybody can learn if they’re given the right pathway for doing it.
Christopher: I think when you say the word “banjo,” people immediately hear banjo playing in their head. That there’s a fast flurry of notes, that it’s very kind of active and energetic. Is banjo a difficult instrument to play by ear for that reason?
Josh: Good question. I think there probably is some … Yes. Depending on how you go about it or how you deconstruct banjo playing. If you have a framework for understanding what’s going on with the banjo when you’re listening to it, it makes playing by ear a whole lot easier. One of the reasons for banjo having a fairly high failure rate, particularly bluegrass for banjo, which is the staccato, really fast sequence of notes, is that people oftentimes try to approach it as if it’s one single entity. Like you’re just hearing all those notes and you’re just trying to replicate that without peeling back and seeing, what’s this structure that’s producing this?
Josh: It’s really, you have these melody notes, and then you have all of this stuff going on around it. There’s more stuff going on around it than there are actual melody notes going on. If you deconstruct it and start it from the building blocks that are there, it makes it a whole lot easier, whereas if you were to try to especially learn by ear, even just making sense of what’s happening is hard, without some kind of slowdown software to even hear the notes. It’s really hard. So it’s fair easier to start with … Every complex scale is just an accumulation of simpler ones, right? It’s figuring out what’s the simplest way to start with and then build on top of that.
Josh: But absolutely, if you were to try to learn … That’s part of the myth, right? That people would think that if you’re learning to play banjo by ear, the conventional myths that are out there, that that just means you listen to some professional banjo player playing this crazy sequence of notes, and then you just play the same thing on your banjo. That’s how it works, right? When it’s totally not like that, right? The first steps, one of the things that we do, that I do in the banjo courses, the very first step in teaching to play by ear is, first, we take recordings of tracks of professional banjoists playing a song and then teach them first how to extract the melody from that.
Josh: The first thing you need to be able to understand is how to deconstruct what you’re hearing into the component parts. Then the next step is then taking that basic melody, figuring out what are those notes, and then adding on top of it.
Josh: Okay, then, what are kind of the rules the banjo players use to decorate those notes? What are the extra sounds that you use? Then you can put those in. That part is really just pattern based. The real ear learning part of it is really extracting the melody and chords. You’re building your foundation, and then you’re using different patterns to fill it all out. But understanding that, I mean, that unlocks everything. If you understand the structure of it, whereas if you were just trying to do the whole thing all at once, it would be impossible for anybody.
Christopher: Absolutely. You mentioned you play a few other instrument, partly before banjo and partly since. How does that approach or that understanding of learning to play by ear compare across instruments?
Josh: I mean, I think it probably … There’s definitely some universals. For me, it’s always about starting simple and building from there, with everything, everything. There’s so much magic that happens when you just add a few simple things together. It doesn’t matter what instrument you’re playing. It’s those moments when you experience that for the first time that are kind of a revelation in music, where you’ve learned a few little things, and then you put them all together, and you’re like, whoa, this sounds amazing. You feel like you didn’t do anything that great, but it’s starting to come together. Those are powerful illustrations of that concept.
Josh: I think that ultimately, it’s very easy to get intimidated by music, whether it’s a particular genre that feels intimidating or an instrument that feels intimidating, but if you break it down to its fundamentals, it’s essentially just all frequencies of sound. It’s all the same stuff, fundamentally, and then music itself is just melody, rhythm, and harmony. Just figure out, okay, what are those three components, and you can build up from anywhere.
Josh: If you start there, everything kind of looks the same, right? You just figure out, these are these same concepts applied to these different instruments. I think once you’ve kind of unlocked those basic building blocks, then it becomes a lot easier to apply them on whatever instrument. Then it’s really just a matter of learning the mechanics of how that particular instrument works.
Christopher: Got you. You touched on something there which is really important, I think, which is we often, we’re attracted into the process by the end goal, and that first flurry of notes that we want to be able to play by ear, and then we get into it, and that’s not what we’re learning, because we have to start from the beginning and we have to start from the basics. You have a lovely post on your site, one of the laws of Brainjo is about motivation. I wonder if you could share the story you tell in that post about motivation and how to handle that discrepancy.
Josh: Yeah. This was kind of a revelation that I had not that long ago that seems kind of obvious in retrospect, but it clearly wasn’t, because it hadn’t really occurred to me in that particular way. One of the things that I’m really passionate about doing is keeping people from giving up. There are different reasons why that happens. There are limiting beliefs, there are mindsets about music, about what it takes, the talent versus innate ability and all that kind of stuff. So much of it is just psychology and mindset, and one of the things that gets in the way is this, we come to music and we think, okay, we have some end goal in mind, right? You have a particular player you idolize. You say, I want to be like that one day.
Josh: But that may be three, five, 10 years off. You don’t know, and you really don’t know what the path to getting there is going to look like. You kind of only go to what’s next in front of and then keep kind of moving forward along that. If you try to take that … If you were to just say, “Here’s where I am now, here’s where I want to be,” and you’re just constantly looking at that gap, over time, it becomes a little bit demoralizing, especially if you realize, okay, I’m making progress, but man, if I keep up at this pace, it’s going to be 10 more years or whatever, you know?
Josh: Taking that kind of as your sort of only framework for assessing what you’re doing is a prescription for getting frustrated and giving up. But the thing is, the revelation was that that’s really not what keeps me going, and I don’t think that’s what keeps most everyone I talk to going. What I realized was that the first … Where I am now versus where I was in the beginning, when I make progress or when I play a new song or something, it’s no more fun now than it was then. Those first few songs, I probably could, I don’t know … One of the most joyous moments was just being able to strum and sing my first song on the guitar, right? It wasn’t anything complicated, but it was just like, here it is, I did it. It felt amazing.
Josh: Each moment along the way of progress like that feels amazing. It’s not like once you get to a more advanced level, it feels any different, any more amazing. It’s all great. Focusing on just … There’s a lot of reasons for why it’s better to focus on the next step rather than the step that’s a thousand steps in front of you, but just from a pure enjoyment perspective, it’s actually just as fun every point along the way. No longer am I chasing any kind of idealized version of myself far out. It’s just about making progress and enjoying each time, because that’s actually where the enjoyment comes from.
Josh: There will always be … You will always feel like you can get better. There’s never going to be a moment where you say, “Okay, I’ve arrived. I’m done.” Right? It’s an illusion anyways, so anyways, that’s a much more helpful way, I think, to frame the journey, in a way that makes it a lot less likely that you’ll give up in frustration.
Christopher: Absolutely, yeah. You hear the advice, enjoy the process or enjoy the journey, but I think the way you just described it is so much more powerful, because it makes that point, that the journey is all there is.
Josh: Exactly, right. Right. Really, it’s the same concept, but it’s like, it’s thinking about it in a little bit different way that makes it a little more tangible, I think.
Christopher: Yeah, and you actually add another strand to that, I think, in some of your work, which is, we’re not just learning music for the sake of learning music. For a lot of us, and I know a lot of people in our audience, it’s also for the sake of brain development or brain capacity, functioning, as we age, avoiding degradation.
Christopher: I love that you bring that perspective to it, because I think it makes it much easier to enjoy the process, enjoy the journey, and be a bit easier on yourself. Maybe you could just talk a little bit about why music is such a great hobby, activity, pastime for the sake of brain development and preservation.
Josh: Yeah. One of the other hats that I wear is as a neurologist. Over the years, people ask me all the time, what should I do to help with my memory, what should I do to protect against developing Alzheimer’s disease or cognitive function declining over time? They’re usually expecting me to say, “Do crossword puzzles,” or something like that, but my answer has almost always been, “You either learn a musical instrument, learn a language, or learn to dance.” Things like that. Music is … I don’t think you could argue that there’s any better form of cognitive development than music. Just purely from a standpoint of the amount of cortical real estate, so the amount of the brain that’s used when you’re learning music, when you’re playing music, there are few things that compare.
Josh: What we’ve also learned, maybe in the past few decades in neuroscience, is that new learning, so any time you’re engaging in neuroplasticity, so building new networks, increasing the density of gray matter in certain areas, that that not only protects against degeneration but can actually restore the brain to a more youthful state. There’s some pretty remarkable research along those lines. There’s sort of the cognitive benefits in the here and now of music, because I totally think that building the kind of neural networks that are required to play music does transfer into other domains.
Josh: There’s a book called Range by David Epstein that recently came out. Great book. In it, he talks about Nobel Laureates, who are 22 times more likely to be performers of some kind, whether it’s musicians, magicians, things like that. There’s all sorts of research from that, that people at the heights of cognitive output, per se, or cognitive performance, are multidisciplinary and particular in things like the performing arts. I don’t think that’s coincidence. I do think there’s real benefits in the here and now for cognitive function, but also in protecting the brain over time.
Josh: I think there’s enough evidence to indicate that when we learn new things, the brain takes that as a signal that we need to keep this apparatus around that allows us to do this, so it sorts of keeps that machinery in good working order, whereas our brain’s not stupid. If we stop using it, it literally down-regulates all the genes and things that are required to maintain that, and that has consequences. It has consequences on our cognitive function, but it also likely has consequences in terms of how protected we are against degeneration and disease. So, there’s reasons from that perspective.
Josh: The other thing that comes out if you take this perspective, is that if you’re optimizing for brain health and brain function, then it’s actually great to be terrible at something. You want to choose the thing where there’s the most capacity for growth. This can completely flip on its head how we might typically feel about things. From this perspective, if you’re terrible, if there’s a huge gap between where you are now and some idealized version you want to be down the road, that’s fantastic, because that means there’s a tremendous amount of growth that can happen, which will then translate to all these cognitive benefits that you can accrue for it.
Josh: If you take that even further, you could argue that if you’re optimizing for brain health and not optimizing for mastery, once you reach a certain level, you’re actually better off jumping to something, whether it’s a new instrument, a new genre, a new style or so forth, something that you’re less familiar with rather than those finer points that we know make the difference between being intermediate, advanced, and a master at something. Another useful perspective, I think, particularly if you’re someone who cares about the health of your brain and your cognitive function.
Christopher: Absolutely. I’m really glad you shared that point. I very much enjoyed your recent podcast episode. Josh’s podcast, Intelligence Unshackled, digs into all this kind of stuff in more detail. Not music specific, but often with musical examples, and I loved your episode on that, because, like you say, it totally flips it on its head, and I think particularly for adult learners, anything we can do to make us feel okay about not being good at something is a really benefit, it’s a really important thing.
Josh: Exactly.
Christopher: Maybe we could talk a little bit about adult learning, because I know that at Brainjo you specialize not in teaching children the banjo but teaching adults. In particular, we’ve talked about how playing by ear is possible to learn, and some of the challenges we might encounter around motivation and some maybe different ways to think about why we’re learning music, but you have a great post also sharing some quite solid reasons why you actually have advantages as an adult learner, compared with the child that you might envy, who learns anything easily, because children are a sponge. I think we often come at it with that assumption, but as you pointed out, there are certain benefits to being an adult.
Josh: Right. There are a lot of ideas and biases that I think a lot of people have about the differences between an adult and a child when it comes to learning anything, and the prevailing idea is heavily biased towards thinking that the child brain has all the benefits and all the advantages. I’d argue that there may be some kernel of truth in some domains there, but much of what we’ve taken as the accepted wisdom hasn’t been proven, and that there are alternative hypotheses that haven’t been tested or explored.
Josh: There’s that, to say, this idea that the child brain is inherently better at picking up something like music, I think that’s still an open question. There are definitely advantages that adults have. There’s also the fact that much of what we’ve ascribed as byproducts of the aging process in the brain have been shown to be reversible. We don’t really have an understanding of what true aging in the brain looks like yet. Until we even answer that question, we should be careful to say what’s possible and what isn’t possible, right? That’s still research that needs to be done. I’m writing a paper with a friend that hopefully will be published on that topic, about questioning what is true cognitive aging.
Josh: But, back to the distinction between the child and the adult who’s trying to learn a new instrument. One thing that the adults have as an advantage is the parts of the brain that are involved with focus and attention are definitely more well developed in the adult brain. One of the last areas to develop in the human brain are the frontal lobes, typically end of teenage years, even into early 20s is when those fully mature. That’s the part of the brain that kind of sends the attention signal to other parts to say, you need to change, you need to learn this new skill.
Josh: Another one of the things that I try to emphasize about how we even conceive of practice is that practice is our time where all we’re really trying to do is send our brain a cue for what it’s supposed to be working on. So, almost all of our learning is happening not when we’re practicing, or all the changes that support new skill acquisition happens not when we’re practicing but when we’re not practicing and mostly during sleep. So, our primary purpose of practice in general is simply to tell the brain, these are the things I want you to be working on tonight and tomorrow night, whatever.
Josh: The way in which we tag … During the course of our day, we have gazillions of bytes of data coming at us, right? We’re not going to store all that. That’d be stupid and we’d run out of capacity, so we have to have mechanisms for tagging what’s important, telling our brain what you need to change for tonight and what you can discard and not worry about. The part of the brain that does that is our frontal lobe, and it does it through secreting a chemical called acetylcholine. It has these long projections that go out to different parts of the brain, and the parts that’s been processing information that it wants to stick, it squirts more acetylcholine into that area to tell it, tonight you’re going to revisit this and learn it for tomorrow.
Josh: The adult brain is better at that. That’s the part of our brain that’s more well developed. We can be much more efficient in how we use our practice because of that. We all know … Probably some of the listeners are aware of the concept of deliberate practice, right? Just practicing alone isn’t really what you want, you want to be actually practicing on specific things that you know are going to move the needle forward. Again, that’s another area where an adult has an advantage, in that they’re able to sort of plan out a sequence more than a child brain can. Again, something that’s mediated by the frontal lobe. You have this ability to focus and attend better. You also have the ability to plan out your learning in ways that a child brain doesn’t.
Josh: Really, you’re left with there are probably, if we think about anything that might be sort of an inevitable byproduct of aging, you might could argue that processing speed is one thing that will slow down. So just the speed of transmission, which would affect, maybe, your ability to … How fast you could play, how fast you can send the signal to your muscles. But it doesn’t appear that if that’s true, that it’s enough to impact the music you can make in any meaningful capacity. You might not be setting a world record for how fast you can play a song, but for stuff that would matter for making music, it doesn’t seem to matter. That’s one of the main advantages, if there is one, of the childhood brain.
Josh: Then the other that people may often think about is just the childhood’s brain capacity for plasticity, so how readily it’s able to change itself in response to experience. We know that, obviously, childhood’s a time of very rapid learning. Much of that is developmentally scripted learning that happens, learning to talk, learning to walk. Really, we’re look at what are the differences in the plasticity that supports general purpose learning, so music would be a category there. Something that’s not common across the human species.
Josh: In general, we might see that in general purpose that you might see a childhood brain, if you’re given the same type of practice, controlling for all factors, a childhood brain may learn that faster, but what we’ve also learned is that plasticity itself is plastic. Meaning that if you are not on a pace of continuous learning throughout your life, we talked about this a little bit ago, your brain actually down-regulates those mechanisms. What we don’t know is, are those differences inevitable parts of aging, or are those simply reflections of the natural course of a human life, which these days, partly or a lot culturally, is heavily biased towards front loading the learning early in life.
Josh: So, we don’t know if someone continuously learns throughout their life new things as a child would be doing, who’s continuously up-regulating those general purpose learning mechanisms, are those differences still going to exist or not? That’s one of those questions that we don’t even have an answer to. Suffice it to say that the best way to keep your brain in a childhood state and reap all the benefits that you had then and the ones that you have now as an adult is simply to continue to acquire new skills and new capacities.
Christopher: Fantastic. And you are actively helping people do that with your work at the Brainjo Collective. Could you talk a little bit about that project?
Josh: Yeah, sure. The Brainjo Collective started at the same time that I began the Intelligence Unshackled podcast. The goal of that podcast and that whole mission is just to talk about anything that relates to improving the health and function of the brain. It was kind of a way to organize all the different hats that I wear under one umbrella and talk about things that really interest me the most. The Collective was a way of allowing people to support that podcast but also to build a community of people who were interested in these same sorts of things, so that we could all learn from each other.
Josh: One of the things that I started as part of that was what I referred to as the Brainjo Brain Fitness challenges. So, trying to sort of promote this idea that just as we think with exercise, everybody takes it as an accepted wisdom that exercise is just inherently good for your body. We do it. Most people who are going out biking or running, they’re not going out to become Olympians. They’re doing it to improve the health of their body. The same concept applies to the brain, but we haven’t widely embraced that idea.
Josh: I personally think that there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that that’s true and that new learning should be a continuous part of anyone’s life if you’re interested in protecting the brain, the health of the brain in the same way you protect the health of the body. We all know the brain’s more important anyway. So I started these Brainjo Fitness Challenges as ways of kind of, as a group, we do some new form of learning that the express purpose of which is to reap the cognitive and brain health benefits, with the skill acquisition being a happy byproduct.
Josh: The first one that we began doing was a learn the ukulele challenge. The Collective launched in January, so we’re almost finished with that one. I’ve created a course for that that’s similar to the other courses I’ve done with Brainjo, but in this case really focusing on the intention being doing it for brain health specifically as the first priority.
Christopher: Very cool. Give people a taste of what it means that you made the course similar to your other courses. What’s the inherent Brainjo philosophy or methodology that would make this different from your average Ukulele for Dummies book or video series?
Josh: Right, right, right. I guess the fundamental idea or concept for Brainjo was to integrate what we learned about how the brain changes or neuroplasticity into a methodology for learning music. Essentially, it’s a learning framework that you could apply to anything. Music is a great place to apply it for a lot of reasons, one being because it’s a place where the talent myth has been so pervasive. A great place where if folks can demonstrate for themselves that it’s not about aptitude but about process, it’s a really powerful illustration that this concept may apply to all other domains of their life.
Josh: That was one of the motivations for starting it, because I felt like, I talked earlier about not having a path to going where I wanted to go and wanting to get people that, and trying to create the best or the most effective path for doing so was the core idea behind Brainjo. Fundamentally, all we’re trying to do when we’re learning an instrument or learning any new skill is change the brain. We’re trying to create a version of the brain that can play whatever instrument that we’re trying to play.
Josh: Obviously, the thing, and this would apply to all of education, the thing is what’s the science of brain change. Anything that we’re doing to educate is fundamentally trying to get at that question. It may have different ways of doing so, but to me it made perfect sense that as we’re learning about how the brain actually does this, this should be integrated into methodologies for learning, and music is a great place to do that.
Josh: Another reason music is so great is because the feedback loop is so tight and so immediately apparent, so you have lots of immediate feedback and you have a pretty steep learning curve. It’s a nice place to test this type of methodology. At any rate, the difference is, then, how the content is organized. A lot of what I would have encountered previously would be, I would say, “These are the things that you need to learn,” but how to learn them and what sequence they’re learned in wasn’t really spelled out for me.
Josh: I realized, both experientially and understanding the neuroscience behind it, that those two things matter a whole lot, right? Really, the difference between somebody who continues to learn and continues to press and someone who doesn’t is, again, not the brain they’re born with but the one that they build. All of that’s determined by the sequence of practice and how they go about practicing. If you’re practicing in a way that leverages your brain’s natural ability to change itself and moves it in the direction that you want it, then the sky’s the limit. Those concepts are embedded into how the courses are delivered.
Christopher: Terrific. You have several posts on your website sharing really great insights into improving practice or extending beyond practice. The comment you made in passing a few minutes ago about how you can see practice time just as a way of giving your brain instructions on what to work on later, that alone can transform how someone thinks about practice. I’d love if we can talk about a couple more of the ideas that you cover on the Brainjo site, one of which is visualization, and that conceptually has come up on the show before, but not in quite the way you talk about it. I wonder if you can share how visualization is a part of your own practice or what you teach the students of the Brainjo methods.
Josh: Yeah. I’m a huge fan of visualization. I wrote the article, I first wrote an article in a magazine about it. It was giving the analogy between visualization and using the Force. As a kid, I always wanted to be Luke Skywalker and change things in the world with my mind. Literally, that’s what we’re able to do. It’s pretty astonishing, the research on it, that simply thinking about something, you can change your brain.
Josh: The research specifically on music and other forms of skill learning is that when you’re visualizing, first person visualization of engaging in some activity, you’re activated almost all of the same areas of the brain as you are when you’re doing the actual activity. There are also studies that are showing that the benefits of doing so, that the improvements, sort of the external metrics of improvement, as well as the neurological or neurophysiological correlates of those improvement change, whether or not you are visualizing or actually doing practice versus if you compared across groups, the visualization and the practice groups will improve, and the ones that don’t practice don’t.
Josh: You can get many of the same benefits as a physical practice simply with visualization. It’s important. One of the things I always emphasize to make sure we’re not … Some people think of visualization like, imagine yourself winning the trophy or something like that. But here, we’re not just visualizing a third person perspective on yourself but it’s super important to actually visualize a first person perspective. If you think about yourself, think about throwing a ball with your non-dominant hand and really trying to feel that visually, or think about switching your knife and fork and cutting a piece of steak and how that would feel. You should be able to feel that kind of awkwardness. It gives you a glimpse of how powerful the visualization mechanism is. If you can feel that, then you’ve got the right idea.
Josh: I use it, I still use it all the time for practicing. It’s a great way to practice when you’re otherwise engaged in something you don’t want to be engaged in. It’s a nice distraction. But there’s also, in addition to just sort of giving yourself additional practice moments that you wouldn’t otherwise have, I think there’s particular benefit in using visualization for developing ear learning. Because in order to actually visualize, so if I’m trying to visualize a particular piece that I’ve learned on the banjo, and if I’m doing it correctly, I’m visualizing the movents that I’m making and I’m visualizing the sound as I’m doing it.
Josh: What we’re truly trying to do, sort of the ultimate goal for someone who’s learning by ear, is to create what I’ve referred to as musical fluency, where you’re taking imagined sounds in your mind and mapping those onto the movements of your limbs. In order to visualize, you have to do that. You have to be able to be … Taking an imagined sound and mapping it onto the movements that you’re making. You’re building those connections between just sounds and motor maps that you don’t have to do when you have your instrument in hand. It’s specifically a way, I think, it’s even better than just regular practice for that particular purpose.
Josh: Then if you find yourself unable to either recall how it’s supposed to go or recall the movements, then it gives you a clear idea of what things you need to focus on, and then you can retry visualizing and seeing it. Visualization is also a nice metric of your improvement in that area as well. It’s a reminder that if you can do that, then you’re on your way towards building the kind of networks that you want for ear learning.
Josh: One last thing that I think is really helpful along these lines is to, in terms of this particular process, is recording yourself playing something that you’ve learned and then listening to those while you’re away from your instrument and seeing if you can visualize. I think you’ll find that you’ll almost naturally do it. If you’re listening to a piece that you’ve actually played, you’ll actually start to … Most people will start to just visualize themselves playing it as they’re doing it. As another way to test the ear capacity is if you’re able to visualize what you’re doing as that music is playing, then that’s another way of working on those mappings, but it’s also an easy way, because it kind of naturally kicks in the visualization process.
Christopher: Yeah, cool. It’s that ear impact that I think is often glossed over when people talk about the visualization. It’s often talked about in the context of stage fright or performance anxiety, and obviously there are huge benefits there, but the kind of mental play exercise of imagining yourself playing it and hearing yourself playing it and, as you say, making that connection between the sound you intend to make and the sound you actually make and what your fingers need to do is a really valuable part that we shouldn’t ignore.
Josh: I should say too that, to me it’s still amazing how similar it feels to visualize something compared to playing it. The way I use it now is if I have some piece that has a section that’s particularly tricky, I can just visualize, just practice by visualizing as a means of getting better. This dovetails with the labyrinth technique that I talk about. Just rehearsing a particular tricky passage is another really great way to use visualization.
Josh: One last thing I should have mentioned before while we’re on this topic, doing it before bed is really a great idea, because we talk about what the brain’s going to decide to work on that night. It does tend to prioritize or triage information according to the time. It gives a little bit of a bias towards things that have occurred closer to bedtime. A great way as you’re falling asleep, if you have some little piece that you’re working on or some tricky passage is to visualize it as you’re going to sleep. It may even work as a sleep aid as well.
Christopher: That’s a great tip. We can’t leave people hanging for too long. If they haven’t been to your website and learned about the labyrinth technique, could you explain what that is and why it’s relevant here?
Josh: Yeah. It’s another one of those things that when you think about it, it seems obvious, but it’s still overlooked a lot. Even myself, I have to remind myself to do it. It comes from the game, the name comes from the game Labyrinth, which is, I don’t know if some of the listeners are familiar with it. It’s where you have this sort of a board that has a marble on it, and you have to navigate a maze. You can change the tilt of the board with little knobs that are on the sides of a box, and you’re trying to navigate the marble through a big maze without it falling in little holes that are designed to trap it.
Josh: My son had gotten Labyrinth as a birthday gift. This was a few years ago, so he was maybe like five or six. We were having a contest to see who could get the furthest in the game. There was this one little tricky section that neither of us could get through. What we were doing was we’d get to it, and it took you maybe two or three minutes to get to that section. People who play video games are familiar with this idea, you have to go all the way back to the start to go back to the thing that is giving you trouble. So you’d get to that part, then we’d put our marble all the way back. We learned how to navigate all that part of the maze getting up to that particular point. It was just we had to figure out the maneuvers to get past that tricky part.
Josh: What I did was I took the game and I was like, wait a second, why don’t I just drop the marble right at the start of this tricky section and just figure that out, and then I’ll go back and figure. And of course that worked, right? It dramatically shortened the amount of time it would have taken to master that little part. The same exact thing … It’s something that I’d been doing with music as well, but I realized that I hadn’t instinctively at first decided this was obviously the way you’re supposed to do this, but it makes perfect sense.
Josh: But it’s, again, overlooked a lot in music, whereas … If you have a new song that you’re trying to play and if you look and if you’re having trouble with it in some capacity, it’s usually just a measure or two of some particular area. It’s rarely the entire piece that you have trouble with, and yet what we often do is, when we practice, is we play the whole thing. Then, what even worse oftentimes happens is that we try to gloss over the part that’s giving us trouble. That’s when people speed up or just fuzz the notes together or whatever, whereas what the way … The better way to handle that is simply to focus on that particular section. To isolate where am I having trouble, and just focus on that.
Josh: Going from not doing that to doing that will exponentially reduce your practice time. That’s where I was saying, that same technique can be applied to visualization, so if you have a practice session, you know what little part you need to work on. Just visualize that. You’ll be surprised that if it’s tricky for you playing your instrument, it will be hard to visualize it correctly and then you will make the same improvements that you would make if you were actually practicing with your instrument, and then you go back to it and that part’s gotten a lot easier.
Christopher: You said something similar in that same context of visualizing, revealing problem spots or opportunities, which was that it can do the same for recall, and are you actually memorizing, have you remembered the piece well enough? I know that’s a big bugbear for a lot of our audience, and it plays into this conversation we’re having about adult learning in particular, where a lot of people are concerned that generally their memory isn’t great. Memorizing music is arguably a big part of becoming a good musician. Maybe music’s not for me because I won’t be able to memorize all that stuff. How do you think about that, or what does the research show on this topic of memorizing and music? Is there any good advice you can offer to help people with that?
Josh: Yeah. and I agree. Musical memory is a barrier for folks, and oftentimes an unrecognized barrier. It’s particularly people who would say they have a really hard time memorizing a song that they’ve played. It’s not so much they forget the mechanics of it, but they’re actually forgetting the song. It’s important to actually recognize, where is the difficulty. I think folks who come to an instrument with at least some musical background or they’ve been singing a long time or they’re just used to having a repertoire in their memory that they pull from, it’s not an issue. That’s one reason why I think it can be a hidden barrier for some, is that they don’t … It hasn’t really been recognized that that can be a crucial distinction for some folks.
Josh: The piece that I wrote about it was first talking about what are the signs that this may be something to specifically work on? Because I never encountered that as a real topic in musical instruction, but it’s obviously a prerequisite for so much of what we do, being able to remember how the music goes. But just like anything else, it’s a skill that can be developed, but it’s one that requires specific practice on it to do so.
Josh: Just as you could create a body of recordings of yourself that you would use to determine whether or not … Or use to practice visualization or actually practice the mechanics of playing a song, you can use the same concept to try to build your musical memory. So if you have particular songs that you’re working on, keep a playlist somewhere, keep a list somewhere, test yourself. Just say, can I sing through this start to finish and keep the melody in mind? If you can’t, then obviously that’s something to practice and to continue to, just as you practice any other part of music. I think, for me, the most critical point to recognize is that in and of itself is its own unique skill and if you don’t recognize it as a particular skill and don’t develop it, it can kind of undermine a lot of other stuff without you realizing it.
Christopher: Yeah, it’s kind of one of those lurking … I don’t want to say speed bumps, but it’s almost like a speed limiter or something, that you don’t realize you’re being held back from your actual learning potential by this thing that, as you say, is often not explicitly addressed in the learning process.
Josh: Yeah. I think in that article I wrote, sort of the pie of musical knowledge, and there’s the things that we know we know, the things that we know that we don’t know, and then there are the things that we don’t know that we don’t know. Those are all the hidden barriers. We want that piece to be as small as possible, and that’s where the Brainjo method, that’s where the articles come in, is trying to figure out what’s the scope of all the possible knowledge that needs to be attended to.
Christopher: Well, it’s clear by now, I’m sure, for anyone watching or listening that your expertise in music learning and practice methodology and the brain implications of music learning goes way beyond the banjo, but obviously banjo is your primary instrument. It’s front and center in a lot of what you do. Do people naturally know if banjo is the instrument for them? It sounds like it just kind of clicked for you, and you were drawn to it in a way. Is that normal, in your experience?
Josh: Actually, I think it is. There definitely tends to be a sort of banjo player phenotype. Actually, one reason I enjoy Banjo Camp so much is because it’s like, these are my people. There’s so much in common. There probably is some kind of universal banjo affinity traits that are lurking out there. But yeah, I was … And it may be different things for different people, but for me, it started out with the sound of the banjo. It was just so different and unique and I just knew it, just loved to try to make sounds with that thing. It just sounded so interesting.
Josh: But I also, there are other things about how the banjo has been traditionally used in music, where it’s rarely front and center. It’s kind of a supporting role. Just sort of its history, as well, is really rich, and a lot of people connect with that part of it as well. I think there are a few reasons that really attract people, but I do think that it is one of those instruments that people do tend to have a real affinity for kind of right out of the gate.
Christopher: Cool. Well, in that case, let’s leave people with very clear direction if they’re a banjo fan or a player or aspiring player, where should they go to learn more about your projects. If they’re not particularly banjo oriented, but they’re fascinated by all the brain science and practice methodology you’ve been talking about, where’s the best place for them.
Josh: Sure. The best place if they’re globally interested in connections between neuroscience, neuroplasticity, music learning, all this stuff, the principles behind it, you can go to lawsofbrainjo.com, and that will direct you to the menu for the articles that I’ve written on the topic, which are housed, actually, on, at the moment at least, on clawhammerbanjo.net. Claw Hammer Banjo is the first Brainjo course that I created, and it’s one style of banjo.
Josh: Then the next course was, speaking of playing other styles and genres, is fingerstylebanjo.com. The other ways of thinking about it is that claw hammer is down-picking and finger style is up-picking. So, down-picking banjoists, go to clawhammerbanjo.net, and up-picking enthusiasts can go to fingerstylebanjo.com.
Christopher: Fantastic. I’ll just throw in a big recommendation myself. If you’re watching this or listening to this, you’re a podcast fan in some sense, so definitely do check out the Intelligence Unshackled podcast. I’ve been diving into the back catalog myself with great enthusiasm, and there’s a lot of really juicy ideas in there to transform how you think about learning and brain development.
Josh: Great, thank you.
Christopher: Huge thank you, Josh, for joining us on the show today.
Josh: Yeah, thank you for having me. I really enjoyed it.
Have you ever struggled to make a decision in your musical life? You don’t want to miss this tip from a kid named James – it might just save you from indecision and “analysis paralysis” forever more… http://musicalitypodcast.com/194
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Hi, my name’s Christopher, I’m the founder and Director of Musical U, and this is Musicality Now.
I was talking to a friend the other day and he said something that I had to share with you.
We were talking about the Summer of Transformation promo we’re offering to members and email subscribers at the moment at Musical U, where you have the opportunity to secure a 6-week transformation that will permanently improve your musicality and your musical life.
And I was saying “It’s funny, I know there are a ton of people who are going to be super excited about this offer – but they won’t actually go ahead. Because we’re giving them three options”.
You see, I’m an “optimiser” by nature. I like to think decisions through from every angle and make sure the choice I’m making is the right one, not one I’ll have any reason to second-guess or regret later on.
I’m certain there are tons of people in our audience who are just like me – are you one of them?
When faced with a decision we can get struck by “analysis-paralysis” – where we’re arguing the case every which way, seeking more and more information, hoping to find a decision that feels certain.
And I’ll confess: often in the past this has resulted in me making no decision at all!
And I’ve definitely missed out on some cool opportunities as a result.
Here’s what my friend told me that I had to share with you – because I think it’s potentially an indecision-killer that can help you (and me!) from struggling with this in future.
He said when he was growing up he had a friend, James, who was always indecisive.
Super smart kid, very capable – but always getting stuck in that “analysis paralysis”.
One day James’ mum took them both to the grocery store with her, and said they could each pick one piece of candy to buy.
And James was walking up and down the candy aisle.
Up and down. Up and down. Up and down.
He couldn’t choose.
A full ten minutes passed. My friend had chosen some candy right away but James just couldn’t decide.
Until finally his mum, exasperated, yelled “JUST CHOOSE, JAMES! IT’S ALL CANDY!”
Just choose.
It’s all candy.
See here’s the part that makes analysis paralysis funny – often it strikes even when all the options are good ones!
That’s so often the case in our musical lives.
If you’ve followed us for any length of time you will have heard us at Musical U talk about how there can be no “perfect, one-size-fits-all, straight-line” course for musicality training.
But something we don’t talk about as often is this – There isn’t even a perfect straight-line course for you.
There can’t be. Because musicality training by its nature will have so many twists, turns, ups and downs, that you need to be willing to adjust course along the way.
But here’s the great news – it’s all candy!
Whether it’s with the Summer of Transformation promo (which ends today – link in the shownotes if you act fast)
Or more generally in your musical life, I want you to take this idea to heart: that when you’re struggling to make the “ideal” choice among music-learning options, it’s all candy.
Sure, some choices might be marginally better than others.
But as long as you’re choosing high-quality training from a trusted and supportive provider – you really can’t go far wrong.
(and all the other candy will be there for you later on – it’s not even an either/or choice! It can be both/and…)
So if you’ve been dilly-dallying about the next steps in your musical life, or what kind of musical transformation you want, remember James.
We are very excited to have Susanne Olbrich on the show! Trained by Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, Susanne is a specialist in mindfulness for musicians. She is a musician herself and committed to exploring the benefits of mindfulness for musicians.
In this conversation we talk about Susanne’s own story and about mindfulness for musicians. But we go deeper than just the surface level you might be expecting…
We talk about:
How mindfulness helped her and how it can help you
How to relate to the spiritual perspective on mindfulness if it doesn’t resonate with you – especially if you’re more scientifically minded
An important note about who should take care in exploring mindfulness
Deep listening and how it relates to mindfulness and the “active listening” we’ve talked about on this show before.
Susanne also leads us through a “mindful moment” to give you a “taster” experience of what mindfulness is all about.
We hope we can tempt her back to provide some training for MU members in future.
As you’ll hear her say, it’s not a magic bullet cure-all as some in the media like to portray it as – but it certainly can be a musical superpower and one well worth adding to your own musical identity.
Whether you’ve never heard of mindfulness, you’ve heard of it and thought it’s not for you, you’ve been curious but never tried it, or you’re already practicing mindfulness and enjoying the benefits in your musical life, we hope you’ll enjoy this conversation and get a ton out of it.
Susanne: Hello everyone, I’m Susanne Olbrich, and this is Musicality Now.
Christopher: Welcome to the show Susanne, thank you for joining us today.
Susanne: It’s a great pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Christopher: I have been seriously looking forward to this one, because our paths crossed after you heard our episode a while back on mindfulness and musicians, and you got in touch by email and I realized, “This is the person we need to get on the show,” because I had talked about it from my own perspective and it quite a superficial way that I hoped inspired people to go off and explore this idea of mindfulness and how it could help them in music. But you really know your stuff. You’re running workshops, you’re teaching people. You’ve lived this. And so I’m so excited to have you on the show today to talk about this and unpack it for people and really shed some light on why this might be transformative for a musician.
I’d love to begin, if we could, with your own backstory, because you’re not a pure academic studying mindfulness and then hypothesizing how it might work for musicians. You’re someone who’s really lived this as a musician yourself. If we could begin with the early story of Susanne and how you first got started in music.
Susanne: Well, it’s funny because I teach piano for late starters courses, but I myself, I was an early starter. I started playing the recorder… The story goes I demanded to play the recorder aged four, and went onto learning the piano aged six. It was a very traditional way of tuition, what I call the old school music teaching. I had the painful experience. It wasn’t conducive to creativity at all. I’d like to think that I was quite a creative child. All children are creative basically. I think the piano tuition was very focused on learning classically notated music, and it was very rigid, not a very friendly environment. I refused to go after two years and my mom just kept finding me other piano teachers and kept me going, for which I’m now very grateful. As I think many people experience, school and music education takes the creativity out of us, out of young children who are naturally creative.
Susanne: I kept going with music and with the piano, and then had the wish to study music, but I studied music journalism because I wasn’t good enough on the technical side for piano, or maybe I didn’t have the stamina to do more than two auditions at conservatoires, which was a very painful journey actually. I failed two auditions at conservatoires, and then I thought I’m not a musician. I’ve played the piano all my life, I played every day, but I’m told I can’t play the piano by experts. And so I meant to never touch a key again, and my piano teacher at the time was very understanding, very supportive, and she said, “Oh come on. You can play. You just need to do it your own way.” So I ended up studying music at a university for a music journalism degree.
Susanne: That was a blessing in disguise, as life sometimes goes, because music journalism required me to learn a really broad range of music. Coming from that classical world, I eagerly learned everything about non-classical music, jazz, free improv, rock, you name it, world music. And it was a very innovative music department where you could learn about all these different musics. That was the time of the heyday of the feminist movement in Germany. We had an all girls band. I played the drum kit on that, as a strike against my classical upbringing. We got money actually for a young women music project, so we got funding which then was still around, some money to get female teachers, women musicians of all kinds. We had a fantastic drummer who came and taught African drumming to us, who had studied with an African master drummer. We had a jazz pianist come and show us jazz band improv.
Susanne: That was all very encouraging to learn that A, there are other ways of making music, which are not limited to notation, but much more about feeling the music, and B, there are role models, there are female musicians. I mean it would never have occurred to me to want to write music because that wasn’t what any of my girlfriends did or anyone I knew who was female, and very few of the boys either of that matter. It seemed to be a very special thing, but then I saw and got to know women who did that, and so that was all very encouraging and very transformative.
Susanne: That was all before mindfulness, but then in my early 30s I stumbled upon mindfulness in Plum Village, the beautiful center of Thich Nhat Hanh in France. A friend took me there. I didn’t know anything about it, and I thought, “Well, a nice holiday in France sounds like a good idea.”
Christopher: Well before we dive into that, if I may, I’d love to just pause for a moment for that early part of your story, and understand… I love the way you described it and it makes a lot of sense, that you’d been put on this pure classical notation track that had suddenly hit a barrier in terms of passing the auditions, and thankfully you found a way forward by broadening the styles of music you played. I wonder if we could dig into that a little bit, if we’re not going back too far. If you could give an example or two of what you were discovering you could do that you thought you couldn’t, or what you learned that let you tap into a different part of who you were as a musician.
Susanne: I guess it was very much, for me personally, about the composing. There were, in my year at uni, maybe one or two boys who learned composing, and it felt a very specialist thing. They learned composing the contemporary classical way. It simply didn’t occur to me that there were other ways of composing, and that that could be fun for me. Then in the late ’80s I went to a workshop which was a… In Germany at that time there were quite a few things for women musicians, and I think still are. There is a fantastic network of women musicians in Germany who teach young girls and also encourage them to pick out of the ordinary instruments like trombone. Still not many girls around who do that.
Susanne: I went to a workshop and met other young women in my situation who did certain things. They had a band and they were songwriting basically. The workshop was led by Inga Rumpf who in Germany is very well known. She’s a veteran rock singer, and she writes her won music. She must be possibly in her early 70s now. She played one night, and it was just so fantastic to see someone on the stage like her. I came home fired up thinking, “Oh, maybe I could try songwriting,” and so I sat down at the piano, and just trying out music. It was piano music I wanted to write.
Susanne: I maybe also tell that bit which sometimes in my life I get vivid dreams, and it’s often in times of difficulty or even crisis. I had a health crisis around about that time in my late 20s. One night I had a dream where I saw myself on stage playing the grand piano in a… How do you call that? In a spotlight.
Susanne: People were listening and I was playing my heart out basically. That dream made an impression on me. I was like, “Wow, I couldn’t possibly dare to do something like that, but maybe I could.” I started composing piano music, which was at the time… It always reflected what I would listen to at the time, and at the time it was a little bit of Carole King without the singing. It was piano music, piano solo music, but kind of folk, pop, gentle rock, kind of ballady kind of things.
Christopher: Terrific. Before that fateful trip to Plum Village in France, what did your musical life look like? You were exploring this composing thing. Were you performing? Were you playing in a band? Were you teaching? What were you up to?
Susanne: The thing with bands was I was… From the beginning I was doing solo stuff, because I had this classical approach. That’s what I had learned. And I did take some jazz piano lessons with a really great jazz pianist, but then I noticed I couldn’t get myself to learn another system of music. I did listen to jazz. I loved some of it. As you notice on my album, some of my music is jazzy. So I incorporated some of the harmonies. But I would never call myself a jazz pianist, just because I haven’t properly learned improvising or chord changes. I started many times, and just couldn’t get myself to learn another system. I’ve learned a few chords, and I was like, “Wow, I really like this chord,” and I started to make a piece with that chord, but written down in notation, if it was written down. Sometimes not written down, just recorded. But later for my trio I had to write things out and arrange for the trio.
Susanne: That’s why I never ended up playing in other people’s bands, just because I play the classical way. I play different kinds of music, but in the classical way, from notation, or I can work it out. If you give me a tape I will learn the part. But I don’t just sit down and play chord changes and accompany just like that. I mean I could, in a very simple, basic way, and I have, but nothing sophisticated.
Christopher: I see. That’s where you were coming from when your friend said, “Hey, come along with me on a holiday to France.” Little did you know it was to the home of one of the most revered meditation, mindfulness teachers of the 20th century, Thich Nhat Hanh. Tell us a little bit about that. What was that experience like for you, if you weren’t expecting that’s what you were going into?
Susanne: Well, it was a time in the… What was it? Late ’90s, when you weren’t used to seeing people in robes with shaved heads, which now you get on telly and it’s not such a big deal. But at the time it was a bit like, “Oh my God, what’s happening here?” But then within days I was so touched by the energy of the place. It’s a very beautiful place with lotus flowers and people walking around mindfully. Even as a complete beginner, it rubs off on you. Seeing people move around mindfully, having their meal slowly and appreciating it. Then of course the meditation practice as well in the morning and in the evening. It was very, very… It made immense sense right away to slow down, to appreciate everything that’s beautiful around, to breathe properly, to just enjoy the breathing. I didn’t need much convincing.
Christopher: I see. I have a little bit of a mission with this episode, which is really to speak to the people who do need convincing, and I’m kind of imagining myself 10 or 15 years ago, coming from a very scientific, practical background. I know that some of our viewers, some of our listeners are on the same page as you, and they’re just really excited to hear about your journey, because they’re already on board with the idea that mindfulness is amazing and can be wonderful in terms of the benefits. But I know there are also people in our audience who are like, “Just sounds like a hippie thing. I’m not sure it’s really for me. I just want to go learn some pentatonic scales on my guitar,” or whatever the case may be.
I really want to speak to them because I know from my own experience, having come from exactly that perspective, how much of a difference this can make. I’d love if you could try and explain to that listener or that viewer why does mindfulness matter? Why did this have an impact with you? What was actually going on in practical terms that was new to you or different?
Susanne: I can answer this as a musician. I came home and one thing that is practiced in Plum Village, almost as the main practice, is walking meditation, and that can be very slow, but it doesn’t have to be very slow. All it needs is really feeling the feet on the ground as you’re walking. It can be done in daily life. You walk from A to B several times every day, and so you don’t need to necessarily set aside time for it. You can just walk from A to B and feel your feet on the ground. I found immediately that this helps me with performance anxiety.
Susanne: As I told you earlier, I was performing solo my own music, which felt at the time quite a vulnerable thing to do. It’s like you go on stage, you’re on your own, everyone is watching you, and you’re playing your own music, so it felt quite… Not easy. Quite a vulnerable thing to do. I noticed that before I go on stage, if I do a few mindful movements, it could be chi gong or anything that makes me feel my body, and then walk on stage feeling my feet on the ground, that made such a difference in my life as a musician.
Christopher: You mentioned chi gong there. Could you explain what that is?
Susanne: Chi gong is… I’m no expert at all, but I’ve done one or two classes. It’s a way of moving slowly, moving the body slowly, in ways that stimulates circulation and makes you feel more alive in your body. What happens in performance anxiety or any other anxiety is that we go into a fight flight mode, which is all the blood goes into the limbs to make you run away, and no blood is in the parts of the brain that you need to focus on music, so that’s why we get blank, because all the blood is there to meet the mountain lion or to run away. It’s very ancient patterns that we have, and we are wired like that. It’s a reflex that we get anxious in situations. Bringing the awareness to the body and especially to the feet is a way of dealing effectively with the nerves, so that they don’t necessarily go away but you notice, “Oh, what is it, these nerves? They are my heart is beating? Okay. It doesn’t kill me. It’s maybe not pleasant, but I can handle that.” Maybe my palms get sweaty. Not great as a pianist, but still can survive.
Susanne: Just noticing the symptoms of performance anxiety and feeling them consciously and noticing, “Well, it’s not what I’d choose at this moment, but it’s perfectly okay to… I’ll survive and I can live with that.” That has made a huge difference right away in my life as a musician.
Christopher: For someone who hasn’t tried this kind of thing, maybe we can just make sure we cover the last piece of that, which is how does it help you to accept those symptoms, to observe them and accept them and be okay with them? In practical terms, how does that help you with the anxiety?
Susanne: It’s a really good question because I think what is part of performance anxiety from my own experience is not just the physical symptoms but then where the mind goes with it. So, “Oh my God, my heart is beating, I have sweaty hands. I will mess it all up.” The mind puts an extra double whammy on top of that, and predicts all kinds of terrible things happening, and if I make a mistake the sky will fall down on me. I think many of us have this slightly catastrophizing part of the mind which is not conscious, so we’re not thinking this out. It’s subliminal and that’s why it’s so hard to catch.
Susanne: Mindfulness has allowed me to get to know myself better, and to not only catch the physical symptoms but also to catch my thoughts that come with that. Then well, will the sky fall down on you when I make a mistake? I don’t think so, on reflection. Of course you make mistakes here and there. I’ve even been to a concert with a fantastic concert pianist in Scotland, and she played the Goldberg Variations, a huge, long, very difficult piece, and at one point she messed up and you could see her silently cursing and starting that variation again and messing up again and starting again. I guess on all levels, not just amateur performers, but even on the high level of concert pianists, mistakes happen, full stop.
Susanne: I guess it’s a good skill to learn how to just know that something might happen and that it’s not the end of the world, and then that the crucial bit is how you deal with that mistake. With some mindfulness, you might just be able to play on and still be there in the music and most people might not notice the mistake in the first place, and if they do, your continued concentration won’t make that mistake a big deal because you’re still getting across your music.
Christopher: Terrific. I think that’s a really vivid example for people of how mindfulness meditation and mindfulness training in general can transform how you behave as a musician. I would hate, though, for people to think that this just about performance anxiety or this is just about performing on a stage. Maybe we could back up and talk about any other ways your experience as a musician or your abilities as a musician changed after that first visit or maybe after you practiced this for a while.
Susanne: I wrote to you in my notes that… It was really lovely for me actually preparing for this interview, reflecting back over two decades, I think 22 or 23 years of mindfulness practice, and how it has affected me as a musician. I find in the long run it changed my whole outlook on life, but that’s a day long conversation, and on music and on myself as a musician.
Christopher: Is that something you can express?
Susanne: I’m just thinking. There are so many things, actually. I think earlier you spoke about the identify as a musician, and I had a really hard time calling myself a musician when I started performing my own music. It took me years, when people ask, “What are you doing?” to say I’m a musician. Through mindfulness practice, what happens is you start to hear your inner voices more clearly over time. And it never stops. I’m still getting to know myself better and better through mindfulness practice. There’s so much going on subliminally, but it has an impact on you as we earlier said with the nerves.
Susanne: We might’ve been told certain things. In my piano tuition I get people coming, adults who say, “Well but I’m not musical. I had this long-standing love for the piano. I’d like to stick with it, but I’m not musical.” Then we have a little chat, and it turns out that they had a school teacher when they were little who shut them up in the choir. They were not allowed to sing because they were tone deaf, but as we know now and is scientifically shown, there is no such thing as tone deaf. Some people learn more quickly to sing in tune. Others take much more time. But it’s a skill essentially that can be learned. But someone said this to them and so they believe it as a child. I hear many of these painful stories in my workshops. If you go round the circle in a workshop, pretty much everyone has something to contribute to this.
Susanne: We have these subliminal voices who tell us, “I’m not musical,” or, “I’m not creative.” If you don’t hear these voices because they are almost subconscious then there’s not very much we can do about it. But in mindfulness practice, you start noticing what’s going on in your mind. I started hearing more clearly what my mind was telling me, and I was like, “Oh, actually, that’s that piano teacher from when I was eight, and she was 93, and she didn’t understand me at all, so she told me I’m not creative or she made me feel that I’m not creative. But actually, maybe she was wrong.” When we can see more clearly what the whisperings in our mind are from people who told us things when we were young, then we can question them and decide for ourselves.
Christopher: That makes a lot of sense. There’s an expression that always stuck in my head in the context of mindfulness, which is that it helps you to learn to “respond rather than reacting”. I was reminded of that as you spoke, because as you say, if there’s something happening under the surface that we’re not aware of, all we can do is react unconsciously, instinctively, and that might mean refusing to take a gig because you’re not confident at performing, or it might mean never pursuing songwriting because you think you’re not creative. But once you’re aware of that chitchat that’s going on beneath the surface, which is what mindfulness can help you do, you have the opportunity to actually respond in the sense of consciously deciding, “Oh, do I want to believe that, or am I ready to put that side?”
Susanne: Exactly. Then there is this fascinating thing which neuroscience is telling us now, which has the grand scientific term of neuroplasticity, which means that… It was discovered I think only a few years ago or a decade ago, that the brain keeps changing throughout our lives, and the way the neurons are wired. All that is in permanent flux, depending on what we do. Of course, for musicians, this was an exciting discovery, because it means when we learn an instrument from an adult age, the brain still makes the necessary changes to learn, so it’s proven wrong that you have to be a child in order to learn a new instrument.
That’s also handy for us with mindfulness practice, because in labs, it was shown that long-term mindfulness practitioners and meditators have different kind of brain structures, so certain parts of the brain, where feelings like happiness and joy and compassion and ease, joy and ease, are… I don’t want to say are located, but they are involved in these feelings, these brain areas, the neurons there. These brain areas, they get more gray matter.
Susanne: The brain changes over time with mindfulness practice. We are creating new habits. We’re basically rewiring ourselves. If I have a persistent habit of being very self-critical, which is actually where I was coming from, being very self-critical, then with mindfulness practice… Of course, this is then a long-term process where it comes in that you really practice every day, or most days, you can shed habits which are not helpful for you as a musician, and you can actually rewire yourself to new habits, to a new way of being.
Christopher: I’m so glad you shared that, because that was a late lesson for me. I started meditating in my early 20s, but it took a long time for me to realize it wasn’t just about that day to day, I’ll meditate in the morning and have a better day. There was also this long-term effect going on. I certainly wasn’t thinking in terms of neuroplasticity or anything like that. But I just realized the more I did that, the better I was able to cope, even if I didn’t do my meditation session. Of course, when you look at the brain science you realize, “Oh, that’s why. That’s what’s going on.” You’re fundamentally changing the way your brain operates and your ability to spot thoughts and handle them, rather than just behaving on autopilot to a large extent.
You said something really interesting in our conversation before we hit record, which was that at some point you decided to usurp, I think it was the word you used, usurp the term musician and give it a Susanne-shaped meaning. Could you tell us what you meant by that?
Susanne: Well, I guess especially as a young person, you are looking for role models. I lived in a city in Germany, and I went to all the different sessions. There was a folk session, there was a rock session, there was a jazz session. It was a university city and there was a lot going on, and I went to all the different places, and I felt I didn’t belong anywhere with how I approach music and how I like music making. I was too classically trained for the rock, although I like some… I did play some rock music at the time. And I was too little sophisticated for the jazz. I didn’t know all that I should’ve known as a jazz pianist. Basically, I didn’t belong anywhere, and so I decided, kind of half-consciously…
It was before I practiced mindfulness, but I’ve always journaled just for myself, as a matter of keeping sanity, basic sanity. On reflection, I decided, “Okay, if there is no musical home for me as such, then I need to do my own thing,” so I did. I just wrote my own music. Sometimes was a rock ballad, sometimes a tango, sometimes a 12 tone jazz. I decided that I would just do what I love and hope that, if I do what I love as good as I can, maybe that would touch some other people as well.
Christopher: I’m reminded of something I’ve heard you say, which is that mindfulness helped you realize that there was something bigger and deeper going on in music than just hitting the right notes at the right time or playing a gig well. What did that mean to you and how did it affect who you became as a musician?
Susanne: Gosh, now we’re going into territory where words fail. I guess even before I knew the word spiritual or the word meditation, I guess for me piano playing has always been almost a meditation or something spiritual in the way that you or I feel connected to something bigger than just that little me. It’s very difficult to describe. I think even as a 12-year-old when I practiced my Beethoven sonatas, which is what I was taught at the time, and I went round and round and round for half an hour, the same run, and enjoyed it to some extent, because that was the way I knew how to play, it was a meditation.
It was making me be at home with myself. Thich Nhat Hanh often has used the term for mindfulness, “To come home to ourselves,” which I find is really a beautiful description. When I take a few mindful breaths, I come home to myself. Rather than being here and there and everywhere with my mind, I come home to my breathing, I come home to my body, and I think that young girl practicing the piano was also, through music, coming home to herself.
Christopher: I see. I’m sure everyone in our audience can relate to having had those moments in their music practice, and maybe they’re frequent, maybe it’s just once in a blue moon, but where you do feel that deep connection, where you feel there’s something bigger going on here than just, “I’m hitting the right notes at the right time,” and as you were saying-
Susanne: Connection really captures it, because it’s connection to deep inside. It’s a connection to something bigger, something larger. Also now, for our scientific thinking friends, of course now there’s this whole science on flow. Flow in music practice, flow with athletes. Flow is seen as something that can… Or one element of flow is that transcendental experience, for want of a better word. It’s scientifically shown that people who feel flow in music or in arts or in athletics, they also describe it as being in connection with something larger than themselves.
Christopher: Thank you for mentioning that. I know that for me, for ultra-rational part of my brain, it’s been really helpful to remember that these different perspectives are different perspectives. It’s not that we’re saying drop the purely practical mind and leap into this meditation world. They’re different perspectives on the same thing, and just like you can describe it in terms of connecting with something greater and a transcendental experience, you can look at the same thing from a scientific viewpoint and come up with the neurolinguistic… Sorry, not neurolinguistic. The neurological basis for what’s going on, and the flow, the science of explaining what’s happening.
I think for me, it was a bit of a relief when I realized I didn’t need to make and either/or choice. If I wanted to hang onto my scientific worldview, I could still introduce these ideas from meditation and mindfulness as a different perspective on something useful. I’d encourage anyone listening who feels like we’re saying “jump ship to this other way of looking at things”, it’s not that. It’s just adding another perspective to your worldview.
Susanne: I’d like to say two things in response to that. One is exactly what you just described. I also have this rational part of me which wants to know how something works. That’s why I started an academic master’s course in mindfulness. After I had practiced it of 20 years, I started to and I’m currently doing some research on mindfulness, the effects of mindfulness on musical creativity, so bringing in the thinking mind again. For me, it’s not either/or at all. It’s actually really fascinating to look into mindfulness from a scientific point of view also, if one wants to.
Susanne: That’s the one thing I wanted to say. One doesn’t have to… It’s not about stopping thinking, but it’s about… I guess our world is very based on the thinking and rational mind, our culture and society, and if we look at indigenous cultures, for example, there is way more than that. And how impoverished are if we don’t acknowledge all that’s beyond the grasp of the thinking and rational mind? As musicians, we know about that, that it’s a host of… If a gig goes really well, if there’s flow, there’s so much more than just the notes of the music and that you can describe in words. There is so much intuitively going on. That’s the one thing.
Susanne: The other thing is I want to say I’m a bit concerned about how mindfulness is treated in the media as a cure-all and something that’s potentially fantastic for everyone. In my about a decade now or so of teaching mindfulness and sharing mindfulness with others, in every course I teach there are about two, maybe a couple of people who will drop out, and when I speak with colleagues, then they experience exactly the same thing. It seems like mindfulness does a lot of good things for a lot of people, but also, there are a few people for who it doesn’t seem to do very much, which also needs to be seen and accepted. Part of that can hurt.
Susanne: Now there is some really good research on mindfulness and trauma, so when people have experienced serious trauma and if the teacher of mindfulness isn’t aware of that and can’t work with that in gentle ways, then there’s a chance people get re-traumatized. So it’s really important to find an experienced teacher and a skillful mindfulness teacher, especially with a history of trauma, and if that’s not the case, and then people… Mindfulness is sometimes called mindfulness-based stress reduction, so it’s not all about sitting on the cushion smiling. It’s also about looking at our stress and our difficulties and finding helpful ways, or maybe more helpful ways than previously, of dealing with them. If you poke into a hornets’ nest of difficulty and a teacher can’t hold the space for that, then you might drop out, which is a very sensible thing to do in the circumstances.
Christopher: Got you. My brain can’t help but make immediate analogies to the world of learning music. I guess that’s just the way I’m wired at this point, but I wonder is it comparable to learning an instrument where yes, it would be wonderful if you could give 20 people a guitar and the ideal lesson and they would all learn it and enjoy it and have a great time. But the reality is there are going to be a few people for whom maybe guitar’s not the right instrument, or maybe the way it’s being taught is not a good fit, and it doesn’t mean they’re fundamentally incapable of learning music. It just means that that particular circumstance wasn’t right for them, and it shouldn’t be forced. Is that the situation?
Susanne: I had a situation recently where… As I shared with you, I developed a course, mindfulness for musicians, and I had the good fortune to pilot it at Aberdeen University with music students there, so young people studying community music. That’s a different take on music. It’s not necessarily high-flying performers, but it’s people who will go into communities, maybe even into prisons or into all kinds of community settings and share drum circles and share creative music making with people. Inevitably, again there were a couple of people who dropped out, and one of them sent me an email saying why, and that was just such a circumstances where basically it was not the right time for her. She said she was very interested and she liked it, but it was not the right time for her.
Susanne: When you deal with lots of upheaval maybe, then you want to come to a maybe slightly more settled state first, before you start learning mindfulness. Before example, mindfulness is recommended in situations with depression, but the recommendation is to learn it not when you’re in an episode of depression but rather in between, when the going is not quite as tough.
Christopher: That makes a lot of sense. I will just throw in there that for my own personal case, I tried learning to meditate at least three times before it clicked for me. I think it was a Jack Kornfield book that finally just made it accessible to me, and I was very quickly able to get up to speed, where previously it had felt like wading through mud when I tried. I just wanted to throw that in to say if someone is curious to try, and I’m going to ask you Susanne, in a little bit how people could get involved if they are keen to explore this more, but if you find that your first experiences aren’t easygoing, don’t assume it’s not possible for you. It can just be not the right time or not the right approach.
Christopher: Susanne, there was something else I was really keen to talk with you about, and it comes back to what we were discussing a moment ago, in terms of there being more going on in music than what we immediately see, than the notes on the page or the notes that we’re playing. That’s Pauline Oliveros’ work on deep listening, which I know you’re also very familiar with. I wonder if you could introduce that for people who haven’t heard of Pauline, or people who haven’t come across this term, deep listening. Maybe you could give an introduction to what it’s all about.
Susanne: First time I heard about Pauline Oliveros was in my 20s, and I ended up doing part of my music master’s degree on her work. Then it was all pretty brand new in the ’80s. She was a performer and composer and meditator, and just great human being. I say she was, because she died well in her 80s just over a couple of years ago. She developed the deep listening approach, which is she pioneered the connection between music making, creative music making and meditation. She developed deep listening retreats, which I had the very good fortune to be on one in 2005 in Switzerland. A lot of her work happened in the US, and now it’s carried on by her students.
Susanne: If you Google deep listening, there is a deep listening department at Rensselaer Polytech in Kingston, New York, and they do online trainings. I just got my certificate as a facilitator last year. Deep listening makes use of listening to sounds, producing sounds, listening to ambient sounds, listening to your dreams and also listening to your body in ways that stimulate your creativity, your creative practice. There are lots of deep listening pieces still I guess even online, if people want to research.
Susanne: Deep listening pieces are written prose which almost reads like a poem or maybe a meditation instruction. They guide you through a listening process, so you are guided through listening in particular ways, bringing your attention to sounds, and then sounding with them. Usually there’s some kind of body warmup before hand, and you also connect with your breathing. You could do a little breathing improv just with breath sounds. It’s usually group work, so it’s done in groups, and it can be very deep, it can be very funny, it can be very inspiring.
Christopher: How has that affected your own view on mindfulness and music? What did it bring to your musical life?
Susanne: Well in the very first place, some validations that I’m not the only person interested in this combination of meditation and music and meditative approaches to music making. Also, it’s a very receptive approach. I guess in our culture we have a very go-getting approach, so even in music practice there can be a lot of striving to get this right, to improve our technique, and to get better gigs. In mindfulness, for example, we also talk about non-striving, to come from a place of letting things come to you. It sounds pretty revolutionary, doesn’t it, in our culture?
Susanne: Deep listening has a strong emphasis on being receptive, to really sit and listen, and see what… Becoming curious of what’s happening. There are so many sounds that go unnoticed. Then there are also listening to your own creative impulses. That are so many creative impulses that go unnoticed, just because we’re busy with the next email, with the next phone call.
Christopher: Terrific. If people have been following our recent episodes, they will have heard us talk a lot about active listening, and I just want to clarify that they’re two slightly different things. There’s a lot in common in terms of being present and being aware and opening up your musical awareness, but where we talk about active listening, it’s about tuning into the details of a piece of music and becoming fully conscious of everything that’s there. Deep listening is a very particular exploration of sound more than music. I think that’s right. And extending that into the world at large, which can then feed back into your musical life in interesting ways.
Susanne: It’s both sound and music. You also listen deeply to music and to your own music. But it’s in a more receptive way, I would say. But then of course you produce sounds as well. You play music, and that could be… It’s not stylistically fixed. It could be a rock piano or a jazz piano or elements of that, or it could be free, although of course she has worked in the context of experimental music, so potentially it could be quite free using your voice or your instrument to make unexpected sounds as well.
Christopher: Well, I was nervous to bring it up because I think this is one of several topics you and I could happily talk about all day, and I want to make sure we do justice in the future on this show called Pauline Oliveros’ work. We have an interview, an article that Sabrina from the team did a few years back on the difference between hearing and listening, and she had studied under Pauline and got a great deal from deep listening. I feel like I just wanted to introduce it to kind of tease it and get people interested and send those who are keen to know more off in the right direction, but let’s bring it back, if we may, to mindfulness and obviously not unrelated, but mindfulness… You mentioned doing a master’s there. Could you talk a little bit more about the research you’ve been doing there, and what it’s leading onto now?
Susanne: I have a question for you before I answer this question. I’m wondering how we’re doing for time, and whether it would be possible to just have two or three minutes, a little mindful moment. I’ve got my bell here, and we could of course talk about mindfulness until the cows come home, but if people haven’t experienced it, it would be maybe lovely to get a taste of it.
Christopher: 100%, that’s a wonderful suggestion. Thank you. I will just say, if you’re listening to this podcast on audio and you have your player set to 1.5 speed or to skip silences, you’re going to want to disable those features now and be with us second by second as this happens. Take it away, Susanne. That sounds wonderful.
Susanne: I’ve got this lovely little bell which I’ll invite to sound, and then I’ll guide you through a maybe two or three minute mindful moment.
Susanne: I invite us to get a feel for how we’re sitting, and what would it be like if we were sitting upright and relaxed, and with ease, comfortably, embodying a sense of weightfulness and ease. If you wish, you can close your eyes, or you could just soften your gaze. Maybe it’s almost as if you were looking inwards, and being aware how the feet are resting on the floor, feeling the contact of the sitting bones with the chair. Seeing whether we can catch the sensations of the breath. Breathing. In breath, moving into the body. Out breath, leaving the body.
Susanne: What’s that like? Where do you feel that? Maybe being curious about the quality of the breathing, without needing to change anything. Are the breaths short or long? Is the breathing smooth or choppy? Just noticing. When your find wandering to far flung places, then that’s what the mind does, and it’s great you noticed. Then you can just bring the mind gently back to your breathing. Maybe to complete this mindful moment, to allow yourself to just take a few breaths in whatever way feels good to you. Just enjoying your breathing for a moment. Nowhere to go, nothing to do.
Susanne: Thank you. Thank you for sharing this mindful moment with me.
Christopher: Thank you, Susanne. I feel there’s a danger now that I’m fully refreshed and as I’m sure you are too, that we could talk for another three hours. I’m going to have to reign in that impulse.
Susanne: You need a sip of coffee quickly.
I just want to say, if people like to have a bit more of this, I have a 10 minute guided reading meditation on my website, which you don’t even need to download. You can just play it. Just in case you got hooked.
Christopher: Fantastic. I’ll ask on behalf of those for whom this was the first time trying some mindful meditation, did I do it right? How do I know? Was that it? For someone wondering that, what would you say to them to know was this successful? Should I do more of this?
Susanne: Well, if you’ve had a moment of enjoying your breathing, then you did it right, and even if it was just one second or two seconds. However, there is no such thing as wrong or right in mindfulness meditation, because it’s just the way it is. Your experience is the way it is, and we’re noticing the experience. If your breath is short and choppy, then it’s short and choppy, and you notice that, and when you notice it, you’re doing it right. There is no goal to reach in mindfulness meditation, other than just becoming aware what’s there.
Christopher: Fantastic. Well, I hope that everyone with us did experience a moment or two of feeling like they were there and enjoying the experience and –
Susanne: However, if you think this might be for you, and you would like to do more of it, it’s really important to find a good teacher. It’s good to learn from someone who has a mindfulness practice, and I’m saying this because mindfulness has become so popular in recent years and there are many teachers out there who have maybe done an eight week course and then a week long teacher training, and of course it’s great. They should also share mindfulness, I’m not debating that. But especially if you have a background in trauma, be very sure that you find someone who is trained in that.
Susanne: And also, half of the mindfulness teaching is delivering the concepts of mindfulness, which are not very hard to grasp, but the other half is being mindful, modeling mindfulness in the way you are. I’ve learned the largest part of mindfulness practice by being around fantastic teachers like Thich Nhat Hanh, and they just emanate mindfulness and you have to try very hard not to be mindful in their presence. You pick mindfulness up through osmosis by being in someone’s presence who who is mindful and who has this solid practice and a long-standing experience solid practice.
Christopher: Fantastic. Are there any go-to resources if someone’s looking for a teacher in their area? Are there particular, I don’t know, qualifications or particular associations that you could direct them to to know that they are getting the right kind of mindfulness training, as it were?
Susanne: There’s a lot out there, and many teachers I would recommend. Thich Nhat Hanh has lots of YouTube clips, and of course her own website plumvilage.org with resources. You mentioned Jack Kornfield who is a brilliant teacher with lots of resources online. Jon Kabat-Zinn is brilliant.
Christopher: Sorry to interject, but this is maybe an important distinction to make. What you just said a moment ago, it sounded a little bit like you were saying you need to study in person with a teacher in a very personal way, and no doubt that is the ideal, the optimal. But it sounds like maybe it’s actually more just about making sure the source of the teaching you’re getting is aligned with the optimal approach on this. Is that right?
Susanne: Yes. Read up about your teacher. See what trainings they’ve done. Especially in corporate settings, I hear that often people are just sent on a weekend course and then are expected to deliver mindfulness practice. Of course, you can do that in an introductory way, but it might not necessarily go very deep. So read up about your teacher and see what they’ve done.
Christopher: Great. Let’s assume for a moment that it’s not a case of trauma or someone trying to use this for depression or something, if we take a simplified case where someone’s just really inspired about these musical ramifications of mindfulness and they want to dip their toe in their water, is that something you can explore in a self-taught way with books and videos and that kind of thing? Is that a useful starting point, or is it better to go straight to in person teaching?
Susanne: I think it can be a useful starting point. When you feel stuck, if you feel you’re unsure or you even have maybe not so nice experiences looking at your stress responses, it’s really, really good to get other people together. The group setting and mindfulness learning is super helpful. It’s usually taught in groups, although I’ve also started doing mindfulness one to one. It’s always preferable to have a group of people who also learn mindfulness practice, and you can support each other through the ups and downs of learning it.
Christopher: Great. And for someone who’s intrigued but needs maybe a bit more encouragement or inspiration to take that leap and try this out, you could talk a little bit about the book, Mindful Heroes, and your contribution to that?
Susanne: This is something I am very excited about. Last year, I was invited to contribute a chapter to a book which is called Mindful Heroes because it is based on the idea of the Hero’s Journey by Joseph Campbell, like a mythical journey where the hero sets out to meet the demons, to face life’s challenges and then grow wiser in the process hopefully, and then through insights has something to bring back to their community to share with others. That’s the mythical hero’s journey which is found in many myths all over the globe.
Susanne: The book is mapped onto this myth, recognizing that many mindfulness practitioners and teachers have been through this hero’s journey of starting your quest for mindfulness, maybe through crisis, maybe through health problems, through depression or loss, and then finding mindfulness practice and resources through it, and learning in the process and then bringing it back to your community to share. The book has I think 18 projects who all came out of the Aberdeen University mindfulness master’s, where people had a project for their master’s degree where they shared mindfulness in their setting. There’s a sports category, and there’s a mindfulness and business category where people had projects and education. Teachers share work with autistic children, with high school, college students.
Susanne: And there’s a chapter of creative arts, and I was asked to contribute a chapter on music and creativity, which is my project at Aberdeen University at the moment, my research project.
Susanne: It’s called Dare To Create. It’s supposed to be very encouraging through sharing some of my own story in the light of the science also.
Christopher: What kinds of things will people find in that chapter of the book?
Susanne: They will find my story condensed, how I find mindfulness, and how I find it helpful as a musician. Then there is research, writing, showing some of the literature that’s around, research others have done in the area of mindfulness and musical creativity. I have to say there is not very much around, but there’s a little bit. And also musicians themselves have written about meditation and how it has impacted. People will find references if they are interested in just reading a bit more on the subject. And also there are some case studies where I looked at four of my own pieces and looked at how mindfulness, how deep listening, how meditation and related experiences made an impact on the creative processes.
Christopher: Fantastic. And I loved that you called it Dare To Create, because I know that a lot of people with us right now feel like creating or being creative in music is something that would require a bit of daring from them. I hope that our discussion of mindfulness today has revealed how it could help you with that kind of inner-game of music and that self-awareness that lets you unlock new possibilities and get rid of some of the barriers that might’ve been holding you back.
Christopher: Susanne, if people are interested, where can they get a copy of the book?
Susanne: The book will be out mid-July, and it will be so new that I don’t have the details yet. But it will be on sale online and in print, both as a download or in print. But people can get a free copy of my chapter if you contact me through the contact form on my website.
Christopher: Fantastic, and that’s at susanneolbrich.net, which we will have in the show notes for this episode, but in case anyone is standing by with a pencil and paper, and it’s S-U-S-A-N-N-E O-L-B-R-I-C-H, so Susanne with an N-N-E at the end, and Olbirch, O-L-B-R-I-C-H.net. You can also find some of Susanne’s music there. I’m remiss in not having talked a lot about Marama Trio and the wonderful music you’ve created there. I think, to respect your time, I’m going to have to direct people to the website, and say go and listen because it’s really some beautiful music and very varied and rich and interesting. We might have to have you back on for a part two in future to talk about that project and where it came from.
Christopher: Susanne, if you wouldn’t mind, just tell people also… We’ve shared a bit about mindfulness in general and you’ve given some great advice for getting started and next steps, and the book Mindful Heroes is a wonderful exploration of what’s possible through introducing mindfulness into your life. But for those are like, “Oh, I really like Susanne and I want to learn more from here, take a moment if you would to just self-promote a bit and tell people what they’ll find on your website and how they can go further with you if that’s what they’re keen to do.
Susanne: Well on my website you find all the kind of courses that I offer. So far, they’ve always been not online but in person courses. But I’m willing to travel, and if you invite me to some interesting places, I’d be happy to come and teach. My signature course maybe I call Sounds and Silence, Mindfulness and Music, and that’s a retreat format where we practice mindfulness and you don’t need any previous experience. You learn the basics of mindfulness. Or if you already have learned them, you can take your practice to the next level, and that will be interwoven with lots of deep listening, sounding, intuitive music making largely. If you want to get involved with intuitive music making, then it turns out that mindfulness and intuitive music making help each other, and they are usually a lot of fun, as well as very nourishing. It could be a day or a weekend or a week, these retreats.
Susanne: But I’m also planning to make this an online course, Mindfulness For Musicians, but that’s in the further away future. But in the meantime people could do online Zoom or Skype single sessions of Mindfulness For Musicians with me. They could book either one to one or get a small group together, like three people would work really well in one space with a laptop to do some Mindfulness For Musicians together.
Christopher: Fantastic. Well, it probably goes without saying, but for anyone who is keen to take the next steps, I would highly recommend checking out Susanne’s website and considering those single or group sessions because I’ve said several times on this show how much of an impact learning to meditate and mindfulness meditation in particular has had on my life in general, in particular my musical life. I’m kind of standing here saying, “Do it, do it, try it. You will like it, it will pay off.” And Susanne obviously is one of the top instructors in the world today, and to have direct access to her like that is quite incredible really, so do leap at the opportunity.
Christopher: Susanne, thank you so much for coming on the show today and sharing so generously with your time and your insights and your own story. I hope we’ll have the chance to talk again and collaborate in future.
Susanne: Thanks a lot, Christopher. It was lovely. I enjoyed it a lot. Thanks.
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