Assumptions about learning and self-regulation
A few implicit and unquestioned assumptions underlie all of the authors reviewed:
- Learning approaches work the same way for both beginning and advanced players, differing only in the complexity of the material and the volume of practice.
- A companion assumption is that this is invariant across age and sex.
- A third assumption is that learning works the same way for different kinds of memory.
- The final assumption is that learning self-regulation (how to practice) follows the same rules as learning musical content and technique
Distilled, what to learn changes with advancement in technical range, but how to learn does not. Similarly for self-regulation. Is there reason to believe this is true?
The easiest first: Self-regulation improves with age. Viloteau’s comment about becoming your own teacher is about self-regulation, not only in when and how much to practice, but what to do while practicing and how to self-monitor and accurately judge your own learning. Viloteau’s implicit (and almost certainly correct) assumption is that self-monitoring is a skill that can be developed with practice. Perhaps because as we age learning becomes more effortful, the corresponding value of accurate self-assessment grows? Any player, though, at any level, potentially benefits from improving their self-regulatory and self-assessment skills.
Motor skill learning declines with age. Exercise has a measurable positive effect for motor skill learning in older adults. Nonetheless, with age, we’re slower to learn, and less fluent when we do, as compared to younger people.
This doesn’t answer the central questions, though: is how we learn constant and the only difference speed of skill acquisition? Are different kinds of knowledge learned differently? Does that vary by age, sex, or specific combinations of age and sex?
The second and third questions, taken together, can be answered to some degree—bearing in mind always that individual differences are significant.
Different kinds of content are learned differently according to age:
- For very young students, learning procedural knowledge is well ahead of learning declarative, as compared to young adults.
- Younger people are better at visual eidetic memory, as would be used to form and retrieve a visual memory of a score.
- Episodic memory is stronger in younger adults than in older; semantic memory stronger in older. (Summary paper.) Episodic memory is for events and their details; semantic memory is about the meaning of the events. Different brain regions appear to be involved for each. Both are involved in music listening (and presumably production). (This video shows five composers constructing very different semantics over the same string of episodes.) (The video isn’t really about learning; it’s just fun.)
- Stamina for sustained concentration declines with age; meditation helps, but doesn’t fully compensate.
Some inferences from the above; these are inferences, not statements from experiments:
- Older learners/players may rely more on using scores to play. Memorization is still required for fluency and musicality, but having the score present to scan would enable recognition-primed memory.
- Understanding structures, theory, and emotional semantics may be more helpful for older learners. Are more mature performers more likely to focus on the gist of a piece, in contrast to the surfaces of technical flash? If so, is that a deeper focus on semantics, a compensation for ‘losing a step,’ an illusion of ascription we listeners impose (seeing a performer’s age and hearing what we expect to hear)? Some combination?
- Shorter practice sections with spacing may help older learners, particularly if different aspects of learning are rotated, e.g., aural, visual, semantic, &c., e.g., as compensation for declining stamina.
Back to the central question: leaving aside age and sex, does how we learn change as we move from beginner to advanced? Are learning techniques like spacing, interleaving, away-from-task attempts at recall, testing, and multiple kinds of encoding and retrieval the same for beginners and advanced players?
- Spacing and interleaving: yes.
- Retention over longer periods, e.g., weeks, months: yes.
- Testing: yes.
- Multiple avenues of encoding: yes.
So turns out for our elite musician-authors, the unexamined life is right all along. We still had to check, though.
Assumptions about motivation
Motivation is assumed to be an intrinsic characteristic of the learner, to be nurtured and not abused; part of the essence of the person, in contrast with a capacity that can be developed and maintained with skill.
The world is sadly littered with people who attained a high degree of musical proficiency who no longer practice or play. Motivation is, it seems to me, a skill of realism in self-assessment intertwined with the practice of pleasure. Discipline is clearly important, but framing it as a personality foundation is quite different from thinking of it as a skilled choice of degree, duration, and selective application. Skills can be improved.
Mathews’ notion of making each practice session, and each thing practiced within a session, an end in itself, speaks to minimizing ‘draw-down’ of motivation. This is amplified by multiple authors’ reminder to appreciate the sound, to always play music: increasing pleasure decreases ‘motivational withdrawals.’ Further, positive emotion associated with music improves learning.
For most of us there’s a mix of internal and external motivations for playing, varying both from day to day and over stage-of-life phases. (For professional musicians, there are added levels of demand, of course.) Consciously developing skill at managing and nurturing one’s motivation seems of high value.
Learning music on guitar 