How Musicians Can Benefit from Language Acquisition Techniques
1. Why Think Of Music As A Language? 🎵
It is often said that learning music is like learning a new language and this parallel is a fascinating one. Of course there are some clear differences; music conveys more abstract ideas and the meaning is changed by both the quality of the sound (such as the texture and instrumentation) as well as the note choices themselves. However, from my career in music and my interest in language learning it has become more and more apparent that there are a lot more similarities in the process of learning than there are differences!
So what makes music learning similar to language learning?
Firstly, learning to read notation is akin to learning to read a new writing system. There are many different types of writing systems across the world, and these are often described as phonographic (like the English alphabet - each character represents a unit of sound) or logographic (like those used in China - each character represents a complete meaning). I would consider music to use a writing system that combines both concepts. When we read music, we label our notation using the alphabet, however each note represents a complete meaning (play a specific note for a specific duration). This is perhaps why English speakers find reading notation such an alien concept, because we are much less used to reading symbols that include a complete meaning!
Secondly, language acquisition is often broken down into four skills that make up fluency in the language; listening, speaking, reading and writing. Each of these ideas can be particular strengths or weaknesses, but each of them also contributes to the strength of one another (e.g. if you are great at writing in another language you may also be great at reading). In the language of music, these four skills can be translated to something like; listening, playing, reading and composing. These four skills make up fluency in music!
If we look even deeper at the parallels; In many languages there are also many grammatical ideas, one example of this being the idea of “conjugations”. Conjugations are variations of a word or word endings that change the meaning of a verb. For example, in Spanish “hablar” means “to speak”, “hablo” means “I speak” and “hablas” means “you speak”. The base meaning of the word “habl…” still means “speak” in each of these, but the conjugations (word endings) along with the context (the sentence it is used in) change the meaning of the word. Similarly, in music we have triad chords (a three note chord) instead of words and we can “conjugate” these triads by adding 7ths and extensions to change the meaning of the triads along with the context of the triad (the phrase it is used in).
All this is to say that while on the face of it music might appear like its own entity, the more we look into it, the more it becomes apparent that music is itself a language and many techniques used in language acquisition can very much help us to not only contextualise the learning process and help us understand what to expect, but also give us a plethora of techniques to help us learn!
2. Spaced Repetition 𝄆 𝄇
The first technique that is often used in language acquisition is a technique called “spaced repetition”. When first learning a word, coming across the word frequently is key to remembering it and its meaning, then over time the word needs to appear less and less frequently for us to remember its meaning.
It is often the case for those that are new to learning music, that they expect to be able to read a note and remember the note on the page every time they see it again! Although that would be great, unfortunately our brain isn’t very good at remembering things. Our brains are designed to only remember information it deems important (we evolved to do this for survival) and therefore if something is only seen and mentally taken note of once, then we will forget it in favour of other more important pieces of information. This means that it isn’t your fault that you forgot and you can’t force information into your head by thinking harder! In order to “hack” our brain we can use spaced repetition to remind our brain that this is a piece of information that we deem to be important!
Note: One important factor to consider is that it is also suggested that language acquisition using spaced repetition is better done when the word is in context. This means that learning a word in isolation is not as useful as learning the word by seeing it in the surrounding sentence and practicing using it in sentences.
So how do we apply this to learning music? Well, when we first start learning to read notes, starting with a few notes (e.g. Treble Clef: C D E F G) we can learn where the notes are on the page and where we would play them on the instrument. Then to trick our brain into remembering them, we don’t need to try to force the notes into our head, we simply need to revisit the instrument to read these notes for short periods of time very frequently (and relearn them or remind ourselves if needed)…this might be twice a day for very short periods initially, but then over time we can space out how often we need to revisit these notes. As we space out our practice of these notes, we can start to add new notes which we visit more frequently.
This process can equally be applied to chord recognition, scale recognition or any other matters of musical grammar in the same way that spaced repetition is used to practice conjugations in a language! To do this, we would need to (1) learn and use the concept, (2) revisit the concept very frequently initially and then (3) over time space out the frequency that we need to revisit the concept!
3. Comprehensible Input 🤔
Another phenomenon researched heavily in the language learning world (most predominantly by a researcher named Stephen Krashen) is an idea called “comprehensible input”. This is a method that has significantly outperformed “grammar first” learning in many studies. The idea here is that you constantly saturate your brain by listening or reading in your target language to a level that is just outside what you are able to fully understand, over time you begin to work out the meaning of words from the context and thus you learn much quicker than learning the language by trying to force the words into your head one at a time!
Comprehensible input is a very popular method because we acquire the most used and most popular words first rather than learning words that we will hardly ever use and we don’t need to worry too much about rules and grammar! This is also how babies learn to speak!
Comprehensible input is why many of those that speak English as a second language will tell you that they learnt a lot from watching TV in English…because once you understand a few basics to get the gist of what is happening in the show, then you acquire new words and grammar from the context!
So how do we use this for the language of music? Well, it only takes the 14 year old who has spent hour after hour working songs out by ear to tell you that they have acquired their ability by just listening to songs they like, working out the chords and messing around with them! - This is comprehensible input!
In this case they are listening to a complex piece of music and taking the parts that they can understand and then reproducing it (e.g. by hearing the individual notes, or finding the basic triads). Each time they work out a new song, they hear something they recognise from a different song that they have heard before and start to see patterns (e.g. adding 7ths to the triads, pop songs use these chords a lot or the guitar uses that scale a lot).
Similarly, for sheet music reading, if you learn pieces of music slightly outside your current understanding, then you start to see new patterns that appear in lots of pieces of music (e.g. classical music often end phrases in the same way, triplets have a certain similar sound in ever piece of music or there are lots of E major chords in a piece of music that is in the key of A major).
Learning the language of music is a fulfilling endeavour and takes time to acquire in the same way any language does. The key here is to not be too hard on yourself and understand that the brain is designed to forget unimportant information, so not only is it ok to forget, but its completely normal and you aren’t going to learn faster by trying to force it. Instead, we can use spaced repetition to allow our brains to understand that we need to remember the information.
We also want to slowly bathe our brain in the new language by taking on information slightly outside of our comfort zone and use comprehensible input (reading, listening or both) to recognise and find new pattern in the grammar of music for ourselves. This way, you can not only enjoy the process but you can also find your own patterns and ideas and become fluent in no time.
Matthew Cawood
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