PA Shorts: Interference! No Penalty.
Last week I found myself focusing on practice strategies again and again—specifically how to change up passages and scales/arpeggios etc. when practicing with repetitions. I have quite a few new students this semester along with some continuing students who have progressed to the point where they need more than simple repetition to keep moving forward. So, we have been learning how to practice with rhythms, altered registers, crossed hands, accents on single notes within a subdivision, accents on individual fingers, and even transposing.
“It’s like those tests where you see a green square with the word red on it and have to say the word!,” said Marie.
Bingo! The Stroop Effect illustrates the capacity to direct attention rather than simply react to information. And, Marie was quite correct. Doing things such as changing octaves, rhythms, shifting accents, and transposing forces you to direct your attention rather than simply allowing your fingers react to the score or to your memory.
You are forced to pay attention rather than just letting your brain handle things on an automated level. Since the brain wants to work on auto and loves to string things together, this interference strengthens the small details of pitch, rhythm, as well as kinesthetic and visual elements.
Musical interference practice has been passed down for generations. My undergraduate teacher used to call it making something harder than necessary so it would seem easy later. Counting aloud as you play does the same thing, as does naming notes or intervals. In fact, these are often the first examples of interference we deal with as students.
The Stroop Color Test is based on the idea that the brain recognizes words faster than colors (word information arrives before color information and creates confusion.) It has also been used to test shapes, multiple languages, emotions, spacial effects, and mental flexibility in climbers on Mt. Everest. There is even a game written for Nintendo DS.
But, I’d say we musicians have always known a thing or two about it.
