Alexa: This week, we're returning to the fascinating topic of learning and practice. Unless you were like me who at school quite liked getting homework, many singers might actually groan at the idea of having to practice outside of lesson time, not really knowing how to do it, and ending up just going over and over and over the same piece in exactly the same way. 

For this conversation, we are joined by Noa Kageyama: musician, Juilliard faculty, and the founder of Bulletproof Musician. And he takes us through what learning science really tells us about effective practice, mindful learning, and why repetition alone isn't enough. 

Come along with us on this episode and you will discover practical, research-based strategies that can transform the way you plan lessons, deliver them, and help singers to structure their practice way more efficiently than they might be doing already, giving you and them fresh ideas to help them reach those goals. 

Noa Kageyama, welcome to the [00:01:00] podcast. 

Noa, I have to ask you first off, have you seen the High School Musical films?  

Noa: I have to say that I haven't.  

Alexa: Okay. Well, this is the thing you need to do straight away when you finish here, because I need to know that as someone who is Juilliard faculty, whether Troy Bolton would actually pique your interest. 

So if you could just, you know, spend the rest of the day watching High School Musical one through three, that'd be great, and get back to me.  

 More seriously, though, what do you think musicians often misunderstand about what elite institutions are actually looking for?  

Noa: Well, this is something that one of my own teachers told me after I'd gotten in and before I was auditioning for graduate programs even. 

He said that they're obviously not expecting students to be perfect when they show up at the auditions. I think we have the, the idea that we need to be perfect, you know, [00:02:00] whatever it is that perfect means for us. But he said that honestly, a lot of times they're looking for someone who has potential to grow to the degree that they can gauge that from, you know, a very short audition. 

But that's what they're looking for because they want someone, you know, who's going to, over the course of four years or two years, continue to improve and benefit from being there. And so that's really one of the big things that they're looking for and a lot of times that's not so much technical perfection, which is always going to continue to improve over time as we put more effort and, and time into it. 

But, you know, a sense of having something to say, even though it's sort of a cliché in music. But yeah, having something to say and some musical instincts and, being a little bit more interested in the expressive elements of playing and not just let me see if I can hit all the right notes at the right time with a beautiful sound and so forth.  

Alexa: Line Hilton interviewed you a few years back now for iSing Magazine. And so since then, what shifts have you seen regarding musicians' needs, [00:03:00] and what have you changed your mind on in that time?  

Noa: I don't know if anything has changed per se, other than my sense is that more students and more musicians are wanting there to be more information available in the curriculum as far as the mental aspect of practicing and performing goes, but also the physical aspects of being able to be a musician in a healthier way physically, but also including things like hearing health, which is not something that's been talked about for many years, but it's been an issue for musicians. 

So over the last year, I've been part of this working group of researchers and folks in the music world who have these grand plans of hopefully finding a way for the accreditation standards to start to change over time. 'Cause at the present, my understanding is that the accreditation standards kind of put [00:04:00] some level of importance on physical health and mental health, and hearing health and so forth for musicians into the conversation, but the responsibility for seeking out this information is really put on the individual or the student as opposed to the institution or the teachers and so forth. 

And the surveys that have been done, from what I've been told, indicate that not only do students want some of this information to be coming from their primary teachers, but the primary teachers themselves also would like to be able to speak to this a little bit more and have more competencies and more understanding and knowledge in this area. 

Which is not to say that teachers now have even more things that they need to feel are dumped on their shoulders that they need to be responsible for, 'cause one hour a week is such little time. But, if it's part of the curriculum, and they, they don't have to be experts in Alexander technique or performance psychology or anything like that, but if it's part of the curriculum and they benefit from these principles and these ideas [00:05:00] and this research themselves in their own performing and practicing, it becomes very easy for that to naturally find its way into individuals' lessons, even from the time that they first start or when they're very young, and all throughout K through 12 and then college and beyond. 

So, if these elements are part of the curriculum in the same way that, you know, most musicians aren't going to come out of school being music theory experts per se, but they have an understanding of it such that they can speak the language and they can utilise music theory in their own score study and listening and, coming up with their own ideas on what it is that they're trying to do with their music and so forth. 

So, I mean, to me, that feels like a very natural and organic way for this to become less in the domain of performance psychologists and physical therapists and occupational therapists and Alexander technique practitioners and body mapping practitioners, et cetera, only. But those folks can work on maybe some of the more advanced or higher level things that require a little [00:06:00] bit more, personalization or specialized interventions. 

But in the meantime, my goal for my class at least, has always been for someday the students to come in and be like, "Oh, this is all stuff that I've already been doing because I've come across it through my teachers in the past." And so that, that day hasn't come yet, but I think ideally for most of us, we would, we would like that sort of day to be somewhere on the horizon that we could aim for. 

Alexa: Can we talk about learning and how we learn? It's such a fascinating topic. Can you explain to us what it would be to learn mindfully versus mindlessly?  

Noa: So yeah, the interesting thing about this is that I spent probably a couple decades practicing incredibly inefficiently and ineffectively, yet still continued to improve over time. 

So it's almost like I mean, this is the case with working out, like anything is [00:07:00] better than nothing. Obviously, if I did no practice at all, I would have not improved at all. But any kind of practice was better than nothing. And so unfortunately, it's like ineffective practice still does more than nothing. So it seems sometimes like that's the only thing we need to do, put more time into ineffective practice. 

And by ineffective practice, I mean, I was sort of horrified to discover a video that my dad had made of me years ago where I'm just standing there kind of slouched over the stand, and posture's not even the worst of it. But basically, just playing the same thing over and over and over and over with no pause or break in between repetitions to, to think about what had just happened or what I was trying to do. But really just kind of like an endless cassette tape, if anyone remembers those. Repetition after rep- repetition with incremental progress towards something that was not as bad, but along the way accumulating a lot of not particularly [00:08:00] desirable repetitions. 

And so, you know, eventually I got to a place where it's like, "Okay, that's, that's not terrible. That sounds okay. I'll move on to the next thing." But really what I've just done is I haven't learned anything in the sense that I don't know what I was doing differently that last time when suddenly things were in tune and, I wasn't playing with weird rhythms or anything like that. I don't know what I was doing differently. 

And so if you had asked me at that point, "Okay, do that again and tell me before you do it, like, what are you actually doing differently? Like, is it something with tension in your wrist? Is it something to do with, you know, the angle of your elbow or how much pressure there is between your thumb and the neck of the instrument or underneath your first finger and the string?" 

Like, any of those questions I would not have been able to answer because I wasn't particularly aware of what specific changes I was making that led to the desired result. 

So mindful learning would just be the sort of thing that we all do, I think, on occasion when we happen to be particularly engrossed in the problem that we're trying to solve. 

But [00:09:00] I think the reason why we don't gravitate towards this more often is because it takes more effort, and a lot of times we just kind of want to put in our time and be done with it. At least that's how I was. Instead of being more focused on actually solving or achieving certain goals, which ultimately is actually a more satisfying and engaging way to approach practice. 

But fundamentally, the idea is to think a little bit more during practice. Take a moment to pause after repetition and think about, "Okay, what is it that I'm aiming for in the first place, and what just happened, and how does that relate to what it is that I wanted to have happen? And then why might that be? Like, why did I get this instead of that, which I have in my head as being the goal for myself?" 

And over time, we can start to get clearer and clearer about what mechanical things might have led to that, and we can then start to replicate that goal a little bit more consistently over time. And I know for singers it's particularly challenging because you wake up some days and your body doesn't feel like it did the day before, and it's hard to see what's actually going [00:10:00] on. 

Whereas, for a pianist or string player, you can actually see what's happening, which makes it a little bit easier to problem solve. But, fundamentally the principle remains the same, even if it's a little bit trickier.  

Alexa: Sometimes I, I know I find this in sessions, if a singer seems to be really over-focused or questioning every little thing that they're doing, sometimes that can be of detriment to moving forward in that moment. What then becomes the positive angle of mindless training and, like, getting out of the mind and into the body a little bit more? Does that actually open up anything psychologically?  

Noa: Yeah. So there's been a lot of research over the year. This is something that I think predates the research in motor learning. 

But some period of time ago there's a fellow in the brass world named Arnold Jacobs, who is this legendary tuba player from the Chicago Symphony, and he intuited something. And again, 'cause for brass players, the mechanics of [00:11:00] what's happening are, are kind of invisible it's all inside the mouth and in their body and away from visibility. 

He intuited or figured out that when it comes time to perform a skill, a complex skill like playing an instrument, it tends to be better when brass players focus on the goal in the moment as opposed to the mechanics of how to produce that goal. 

So for instance, focusing on the kind of sound that they want or kind of articulation that they want or the kind of phrase that they want and how that's gonna sound, as opposed to all the little muscles that need to fire just the right way in order to produce that thing reliably. 

There are times, of course, where we do need to be aware of what's happening physically, so we can better understand the underlying mechanics of a skill. But when it comes time to perform, absolutely, a lot of times when we overthink or consciously monitor or try to control the minutiae of all the complex motor movements involved, we do get in our own way, and that's something that's relatively well established in the motor learning literature as [00:12:00] well. 

So there's this researcher, this woman named Gabrielle Wolf, who then kind of found, I think completely independently of Arnold Jacobs, but I think her experience of this was in windsurfing perhaps, and then started to look at this in other performance domains as well, and it's now a relatively established principle, and there's actually even a study specifically with singers that looked at this, where the idea is when it comes time to perform a complex skill or even sometimes in the early stages of learning a skill, whether in a lesson or, you know, a student on their own, it can often be much more effective to focus on the goal of the motor movements as opposed to the motor movements themselves. So the, the kind of sound that you want or projecting the sound to the back of the hall and so forth. 

In this one particular vocal study, the participants were asked to sing a particular song, and they didn't do this in sequence. They did it in kind of mixed random order. But in one particular repetition, they were asked to focus on the position of the soft palate, as kind of like an internal [00:13:00] tactical thing, 'cause the continuum is an internal focus versus an external focus. And so that was the internal focus. 

And then they were asked to focus on projecting to a microphone some distance in front of them. I think it might have been like a foot or two in front of them. And then they were also asked to imagine or actually physically sing towards, I believe it was the front row in the concert hall, and then perhaps somewhere in the middle of the concert hall, and then the back row of the concert hall. 

And then in the last most external condition, it was focusing on filling the space with their sound. And generally speaking, when they evaluated each of those performances or each of those repetitions in terms of sound quality and ring and so forth, the more external the singer's focus, the more highly rated those elements of sound were. 

There were some exceptions, which I think are related to where in the stages of learning the particular individual was. Like, if you're relatively new to [00:14:00] singing or maybe you're working on something fundamental about your voice, it can be helpful to think about the mechanics involved, because if you don't, then you revert back to your bad habits and so forth. 

However, for most of these folks who had, you know, developed a level of automaticity with where they were with their voice at that moment, an external focus was better than internal focus. So I think that speaks to what you're, you're noticing or observing about sometimes students getting in their own way. 

Alexa: Can we talk a little bit more about the differences in learning and the processes that we might have in place for singers who are brand new to their own instrument, to the skill, versus someone who did it for a bit and is now picking it up again, versus the advanced, continuous, consistent singer who is looking to elevate what they are currently doing? 

What would you say are the main differences between training those three artists and how the teacher would [00:15:00] help them?  

Noa: My initial reaction to the question is to think that there needn't be that much of a difference in the sense that the principles around effective practice, effective learning, and so forth are going to remain pretty universal across levels. 

The degree to which the student needs to understand the principles involved may be a little bit different, and there may be certain differences in terms of... 

so for instance, one of the things that I tend to encourage my students to en- engage in is performance practice, right? And we all know this. We all know we should be doing more performance practice. But I think the degree to which we engage in it, tends to be less than it could be. 

So I have a colleague here in the city who is percussionist in the Met Opera Orchestra who, you know, his normal routine used to be what it's like for many folks auditioning for major orchestral positions, which is you wake up in the morning, and you get warmed up, and then you practice all the things that you feel like [00:16:00] you need to practice, and then maybe at the end of the day or at the end of a practice session, you record yourself to kinda see where things are. 

And that made sense to him and, you know, he did make progress as one does when you do this sort of thing. What he realized, though, over time is that this recording that he would make at the end of a practice session wasn't really helping him. It was helping him with confidence, but then he would go to an actual audition and realize that that recording at the end of practice was not a very good representation of how he sounds at the beginning of a day when he's only warmed up and hasn't really practiced that much and then has to go do the audition. 

So he started switching the order of his day, where he would start off with a short warm-up, and then he'd record himself first before touching any of the music that he needed to work on. And then based on the recording, which would reveal where his skills truly were, then he would work on and prioritize those things that happened, that would likely happen if that were audition day. 

 This, of course, is not a very fun way to start [00:17:00] one's morning. It's kind of discouraging and, and kind of a rough blow to the ego to hear what you actually sound like and where your skills are at. But it it's an excellent way of making sure your practice is efficient, and you're working on the most important things that you need to in order to be able to perform the way that you want, in a pressure situation, and it raises the floor of the worst possible performance you could give pretty dramatically. 

So things like that can be pretty discouraging for someone who's relatively new to the instrument, or even perhaps someone who's coming back to the instrument and still remembers what they used to sound like and are discovering that that's not happening quite so quickly or easily. So that sort of thing perhaps could be reserved for someone when they've started to become a little bit more comfortable and have a little more confidence in their ability to improve and so forth. 

But even for relative beginners, if they're preparing for a performance, I think that can be a helpful way for them to get more accustomed and more prepared for performances 'cause [00:18:00] especially if they haven't performed very much, and even more so if they've had performance experiences in other domains where they're experts, whether it's, you know, they had played tennis growing up and are quite accomplished in that realm, or maybe they give speeches to large groups as an executive, or maybe they are accustomed to being under pressure in a medical situation and do very well. Those folks can be mystified sometimes as to why they don't seem to be able to apply that same level of composure and skill and performance under pressure to this brand-new domain. And to me, it makes perfect sense why they wouldn't because they're not as skilled in this particular area, and they're mystified as to why they feel so much pressure in this domain that isn't really such a big, big part of their livelihood or their life. But, you know, I think we do care how we do in any domain of performance, and so it's very natural, I think, to be frustrated in this sort of way. 

But yeah, even for beginners it can [00:19:00] be a helpful thing 'cause the more prepared they can be for performances, the more likely it is that their performance experiences will be positive ones, and it's nice for us to, even from the very beginning, have more positive performance experiences that start to accrue over time, and we can kind of build off of instead of feeling like performing is such a terrible experience that we never want to do it again. 

Alexa: I was reading your article on amplifying or actually weakening this self-talk and the self-criticism or commentary that we have during performing or our practice, and it got me wondering: is tough love from yourself or from a teacher ever useful? 

Noa: Okay, so that was a question what's tough because, 'cause I think it really depends on what tough love means, right? I don't know that we really know what that means. It's sort of something we feel in the moment, but it's hard to, like, articulate what that would actually look like. 

That's a tricky thing because I think it, it really depends on the student [00:20:00] themselves. And this is sometimes hard to gauge. It also depends on the relationship between the teacher and the student. 

I mean, I think the easiest way to answer this is just to offer kind of a general principle that applies across, honestly, all human relationships, and this is something that, that comes from psychotherapy or counseling psychology or clinical psychology. 

And to kind of go back a step further, there are hundreds of different treatment modalities for essentially fundamentally achieving positive change in psychology, right? So whether you're depressed or anxious or having difficulties maritally or, anything that we might experience that's causing us some distress that we would then seek out professional help for, there's so many different treatment modalities, and there's value in many of them, and many have been validated through research over the [00:21:00] course of decades. 

However, there are certain common factors, as they're called, or, or common principles across these different treatment modalities that regardless of the individual techniques involved are kind of part of each one of them. And so there's been a lot of research done to kind of identify these common factors, and a huge part of the change that occurs in clients' mental state or functioning, regardless of the specifics of the treatment modality, often are due to these common factors. 

And one primary common factor is what's known as unconditional positive regard, or the relationship, essentially that one cultivates between the psychologist and the client, or in this case, the teacher and the student. 

And so if we can communicate to the student that regardless of whether they practiced or not, or whether they sound great today or not so good today, that we care about [00:22:00] them as a human being, as a person, and that we believe in their capacity to grow and improve, that goes a long way in terms of our ability to then be able to speak more openly and honestly with what it is that we feel that they need. 

There's even some, some research on this specifically where... let's see if I can remember the exact details... I think this had to do with teachers giving feedback to students on papers that they had written. And in one particular condition I think they gave them feedback, and, in another condition, the feedback was offered with, I think, an additional line, something about the, the reason for why they were giving them feedback of this sort was because they believed that they could improve, or they believed in... something along those lines. Like, there was some communication that they believed in their capacity to meet the standard. 

And if I'm remembering correctly, the folks who received that additional statement of belief in their capacity were more likely to do revisions on the paper [00:23:00] than the folks who didn't get that. 

And so this can look, again, lots of different ways for lots of different people, and perhaps one kind of related example of this is the legendary basketball coach, John Wooden, who has not been in the, the conversation recently because he passed away a number of years ago. But, when you think about NCAA basketball in the United States at least, if a team wins the national championship once, that's awesome. If they win it twice or even close to winning it twice, that's pretty big. John Wooden's teams back in the '70s, they won 10 out of 12, and at one point, seven in a row. 

So it's a sort of historically unprecedented and never replicated level of success, that makes him one of the all-time great coaches in any sport at any level. And so there were a couple psychologists who even at the time recognized how amazingly he seemed to be able to be at getting the [00:24:00] best out of different teams over the course of many years, 'cause, you know, every four years is a completely new set of, of players. 

So they sat in on a couple of his practices, I don't remember exactly how many, but I wanna say at least a couple, near the end of his coaching career and wrote down and categorized every single thing that he said and he did. Added up to something like 2,300 and so acts of teaching they called it. 

And I often ask my students, "What percentage of these 2,300 or so acts of teaching do you think were praise, and what percentage do you think were criticism?" Say, you know, do you think it was 50/50 or was it like 80/20 positive to negative or 20/80 negative to positive? 

 And usually it ranges, but sometimes people gravitate towards 50/50, and you can think about it yourself as you're pondering what the ratio might be. And then I reveal that the way in which I asked it is kind of [00:25:00] misleading in the sense that as a ratio of positive to negative or praise to criticism, yes, it's about 50/50. 

But as a percentage of these 2,300 acts of teaching, it was only about 7% praise and 7% criticism. So very little of these acts of teaching were evaluative in nature, as in good or bad. The vast majority, like around 75% of everything that he said, was purely instructional, as in, turn your hips this way or make sure your feet are doing this or make sure you, you know, pass from the chest. And, like, very dry, I wanna say clinical, but just very dry judgment-less instructions on what to do and how to do it. 

And yes, so there was some praise and there was some criticism involved, but much of it was not at all judgy. And again, it may depend on the student or the teacher- I think very quickly as students though we realise how sort of meaningless the sort of obligatory [00:26:00] praise is when a teacher says, "Oh, you know, beautiful," or, "Nicely done," et cetera, like, we, we don't really listen for that because we know that they're just being polite or they're trying to make sure we don't get discouraged, et cetera. And what we're really listening for is what they really think. 

And again, it depends on the situation, but I don't know if, if we need to be quite as concerned with softening the blow as long as the student understands that we care about them as a person beyond singing or music, and we believe that they can do these things even if they may not be sure of it themselves in the moment, and so this is why we're going to push them or work on these certain things moving forward. 

And, you know, even with that principle, it's probably going to look different from student to student and from teacher to teacher. But rather than, I think, sometimes getting too caught up in our own heads about what exactly to say or what exactly to do, I think if we keep those principles in mind, it becomes easier to find a way for each student to be able to make sure that [00:27:00] that's being communicated alongside whatever it is that we might want to say to them. 

Alexa: Do you still find yourself doing those inevitable, "Well done, great, cool, good job," after somebody has played, or have you found yourself taking those out over time?  

Noa: Well, when I work with students one-on-one, like, how they play is not a part of the equation anymore. So I mean, so for me personally, that's not something that, that comes out. 

I'm trying to think more broadly. It's probably very likely that I still say the similar sorts of things like in classroom settings where they might respond to a question. I'm trying to think about even in my own life with my kids whether that comes out or not. 

I tend not to be just characterologically particularly effusive with praise anyway, so I think it's weird for people when I do say something that's more like that. 

So all this to say in a roundabout sort of way, I don't know that I'm [00:28:00] generally inclined towards praise or criticism anyhow, so that might just be a little bit more natural for me in general. 'Cause I wasn't like that with myself either, like I wasn't ever particularly internally effusive with praise or those sorts of fluffy elements. 

Alexa: When we are providing feedback or an instruction particularly in a one-to-one setting, when is it most useful to offer that feedback and offer that praise? 

Noa: Yeah, no, this is tricky too and, and I imagine teachers have more intuitive experience with this as well from student to student. 

I remember talking to a, a piano teacher here, or a pianist and a piano teacher here in the States. His name is William Westney, and many of your listeners may be familiar. He wrote a book called The Perfect Wrong Note. And one of the things that he said he was mindful of, and it didn't come naturally necessarily to him, but he found over time how valuable it was to wait before offering [00:29:00] feedback. 

And again, you know, he was teaching at the college level, you know, advanced students. May be very different for newer students or students who don't yet know what they're aiming for or what things are supposed to sound like, and so that feedback might be more useful at earlier stages. But for him and the students he worked with, he said a lot of times the students were perfectly capable of figuring out what the next step was, and he didn't have to give it to them. 

But it was so tempting to just kind of jump right in and want to fix and want to help. But you know, he realized that sometimes letting them flounder a tiny bit or, or try different things and kind of search on their own for the answer ended up in the long run being more beneficial to their learning process in the sense that most of the time that they spend is gonna be away from him and not in his presence. 

And so it's a way in lessons of seeing the student problem solve on their own such that you can cultivate greater trust yourself in their ability to do that when not supervised. And, you know, when [00:30:00] they go the wrong direction in the problem solving or troubleshooting or, or seek solutions that aren't going to be good for them, then it becomes easier to know how and when to step in and try to guide them in the right direction. 

Alexa: Let's say a singer is moving through their piece, they stumble, they happen to make a mistake, whether that's a rhythm mistake, a, a pitch mistake, or a coordination challenge. When is it best for us as teachers to intervene? Should we intervene? Should we allow the piece just to continue on? What is your advice there based on the research that you've done? 

Noa: Kind of in line with William Westney's conveying of the story of waiting a little bit longer. 

A couple things come to mind. One, it might depend on what the goal of that particular moment is. It might be that something happens rhythmically, but maybe the focus of that moment was really on sound, and rhythm's maybe not the most important thing to pinpoint [00:31:00] because again, you know, as everyone has seen in lessons, if a student starts thinking about too many different things, everything starts falling apart because it's hard for us to focus on really more than one thing at a time that we're trying to work on at that moment. 

So it might be that if it's helpful for them to know something like that has happened, A, you know, asking them to kind of assess themselves and to, you know, what did you hear? What did you think of that? Like, what would you want to focus on? And if, if rhythm doesn't come up, and that's actually quite important, then it might be useful at some point to address that. 

But if the focus of that coaching or that lesson is really not on rhythm... this reminds me a little bit of some research that Micah Killian has done, and there's a whole podcast episode with Micah where he goes through the details. But essentially what he did is he was very curious to find out what do artist level performers do when they encounter a [00:32:00] passage that they can't play, right? I mean, because we hear the final product and it sounds amazing, but, like, surely there was a time where they ran into this passage and was like, "Oh crap," like, "how do I do this?" Like this is-- it's currently unplayable. How do I get to the point where I can play this? Because it needs to be at a certain level in performance. 

And so he had six different high level trumpet players, who were principals in orchestras and ensembles and et cetera, record themselves playing a passage that they couldn't play, and he just watched them repetition after repetition to see if there are any common elements involved in how they approach this initially unplayable passage. 

And it turns out they all approached it in much the same way, and they didn't necessarily even know that they were doing this. But when you analyze what is happening from one repetition to the next, essentially what they did is two things. 

One, they simplified the passage in such a way that they could play [00:33:00] it beautifully, whatever the parameters were for that particular repetition. 

And two, they didn't simplify it any more than was absolutely necessary. So by simplifying, Micah actually coined the word doableize, like they made the passage doable. And so this might mean slowing it down slightly or using a, a smaller dynamic range or not quite as loud or changing the articulation a little bit, just making it a little bit easier. 

But the goal was still, even if at a reduced dynamic range or slower, to still play it beautifully, right? So it's not like you suddenly strip all the expression out and all the phrasing out and you just play this very dry, clean version, 'cause that would be making it too doable, like too easy, and it kinda takes it out of context. 

But I think it relates a little bit to this idea of how it can be useful in that moment perhaps to accept that rhythm [00:34:00] is perhaps the parameter that's not super important. Where the main thing, in order to make that phrase or that passage doable for that particular singer at that particular stage in their particular development, is maybe just to focus on sound or maybe just focusing on some aspect of expression or diction or something along those lines. And rhythm, you know, that's for another day. 

'Cause Micah even says this in his podcast episode as well, it's not the case that we need to take a passage that's difficult for us from not playable to, like, performance level perfect in that moment. 

We might just need to take it a few steps up, solve a few problems. And again, like rhythm, I'll take care of that tomorrow. Right now though, it's in tune, has a beautiful sound, there's shape to the phrase. It sounds good, it's just not where I need it to be, and that's okay. It's just a work in progress.  

Alexa: I sometimes find reminding the singer of what the actual intention of an exercise is can be [00:35:00] really useful because there, we can sort of go, "Yeah, but the, I wasn't in my chest voice," or, "I was, I was meant to be belting and I wasn't." But actually, the focus has been, are you able to move from this part of your voice to this part of your voice in a way that feels comfortable? 

So the fact that it wasn't strong or belted doesn't matter because the intention was, can you get there in a way that feels more comfortable? And did you do that? Yes, you did. 

So actually, you achieved the goal. There's just other steps to get it to the end result. 

Noa: I remember, my wife was a pianist. Her teacher in college said that, "You know, it doesn't matter how much you practice or how high a level you can get to, you can always come back here and I'll find ways of making things harder for you." 

As in there's always more that could be done, and I think once we accept that and once we realize that, it becomes easier to, I don't want to say settle for good enough, but honestly, we're all at some point having to settle for [00:36:00] good enough for now, in the sense that even the most famous high-level performers who go out there and sound amazing, for them at least, that wasn't their absolute best, and there's more that they want to do. 

And one of my, my wife's teachers, ... whenever we visited campus, we knew where we could find him, and that was not at home or not sitting around. He was always in his, his teaching studio, still practicing into his 90s because kind of like the, the famous, I think, Pablo Casals quote, he was asked why he still practiced in his 80s or something like that, and he said, "You know, I think I'm starting to figure this out," or, or something along those lines, right? 

So there's always more to do, and, and the higher we get, the more we realize and the more subtle the things we realize there are to do that make things even more awesome. 

Alexa: I think we think a lot about teachers of drill it, drill it, drill it, just get it in. But actually, what do we want to be considering when we do repeat an exercise or a technical idea? [00:37:00] And then when do we know it's time to move on? 

Noa: So there's a fundamental principle around learning that is really critical, but not something that we often think about, and that's the idea of, like, what is actual learning. And it turns out we're not very good at knowing if the things that we're doing right now lead to effective learning or not, and learning would be defined as how well something sticks over time, right? 

'Cause it's one thing to be able to do a few repetitions of a phrase and be like, "Okay, that's it. Let's try to imagine that that's locked in." But we know that, a day or two later when we try to sing that same passage again, it's not gonna sound like it did when we left it. Like, a lot of things will have disappeared. 

And it turns out that's partly a function of, I don't want to say too many repetitions, but the sort of built-in reliance on repetition that often happens in the practice room. 

So this is not to say that [00:38:00] repetition's not essential. It is. But oftentimes what'll happen is we'll do what's called blocked practice, where we'll give ourselves, you know, three, five, ten repetitions or minutes to spend working on a particular passage, and by the end of it, it sounds pretty good. 

But again, the next day when we start, it doesn't stay here. Like, we've lost a lot of those gains that we experienced, and we just, I think, naturally accept that as, "Well, that's what practicing looks like. We take a bunch of steps forward and we take a bunch of steps back, but over time we do improve." And we do, but we don't have to take as many steps back, as it turns out, as we often experience. 

And this is where back in the '70s something known as interleaved or random practice started to become more well-known in the literature and, and increasingly in music as well thanks to certain folks who have done research in this area, starting to become more known and popular. 

And the idea with interleaved practice is the goal is to get things right the first time, right? Not the second or the third [00:39:00] time. When we do block practice and we do a bunch of repetitions in a row or spend five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes working on a passage that artificially inflates the level that we experience in that moment. And we haven't really practiced getting it right the first time very much. 

'Cause once you've tried singing it, whether it sounded great or not great, that was your one shot at practicing getting it right the first time. If you do it again right away, it's not cheating, but it's gonna be easier and it's gonna sound better. So the question is, well, how do we practice or give ourselves more opportunities to practice getting things right the first time? 

And this is where I think a lot of teachers, at least in the violin world, will say things like, "You know, just leave your violin, like, out, and every time you pass by to go to the bathroom or get something to drink or eat, just pick it up and play that tricky passage once." And that, that does work. That's called distributed practice. But if you have dozens of tricky passages, that's logistically not a thing that [00:40:00] can be done. 

So what interleaved or random practice looks like is kind of like studying with flashcards. I think most of us have used flashcards at some point to study vocabulary words, et cetera. And with flashcards, you don't go through the stack once and that's it. Like, the idea is you continue to cycle through the different flashcards in the stack multiple times. The reason being, when you look at a tricky vocabulary word or physics formula and you try to commit it to memory, and then you look at another one and another one and another one, like, each additional one that you look at accelerates the forgetting process, where when you go back to that first flashcard again, you have to work harder to try to remember exactly what it was, 'cause it's all mixed in now with other details that you have to try to retrieve it through. 

It's the exact same thing with motor skills. So the idea is instead of practicing the same passage over and over and over until it sounds better, the idea is to limit the number of repetitions you give yourself or limit the amount of time you allow yourself to [00:41:00] spend on it. 

So let's say, for the sake of easy math, you have three songs or three short pieces that you're working on. Block practice would look like 15 minutes on piece A, 15 minutes on piece B, 15 minutes on piece C, and you're done, right? So 45 minutes, good practice session, and it makes perfect logical sense. But again, in each of those 15-minute blocks, you've spent maybe a couple minutes practicing getting different passages the way that you want, and then you don't practice getting it right the first time again until tomorrow. 

Whereas with interleaved, it would be more like three minutes of piece A, four minutes of piece B, and then two minutes of piece C, and then, you know, like, or just five, five, five, depending on how comfortable those different songs are or how well-learned they are. And then you still have thirty minutes left, so you go back again to A, back to B, back to C, back to A, back to B, back... 

And you cycle through them multiple times, just like with the flashcards. And each time you cycle [00:42:00] through, you give yourself more opportunities to practice getting things right the first time. And you've also accelerated the forgetting process, so it's harder and harder to try to retrieve exactly how to play or how to sing these passages the way that you want. 

And so this can be very frustrating for folks, and in the moment, it feels like you're not improving as quickly, 'cause you're not. You know, with block practice, you start off here, you don't feel very good, but by the end of minute fifteen you're feeling pretty good. Tomorrow again, you lose a lot. So a little bit of improvement. 

With interleave practice, what happens is you don't go from here to here because you keep interrupting yourself and have to go back and start from scratch. So instead of here to here, maybe you go from, like, here to here. But then the next day, when you start, you'll have lost less. So the net gain is greater, but there's no way to know this until you wait. 

So this, this too is where recording comes into the equation. The only way to know, in fact, if today's practice was effective or not is to have started the day with a recording of various things, practice, go to sleep, wait until tomorrow, warm up a little bit, [00:43:00] and then record yourself again. And that change between today's recording and tomorrow's recording, that's an indicator of how effective your practice was. 

And so this is something that's built into most research nowadays because they've learned that if you take somebody, have a baseline of performance, have an intervention or practice strategy of some kind, and then evaluate the performance at the end, everyone's gonna be better. So it'll look like everyone improved and everyone learned. 

But then if you wait a day or wait a week or wait ten days and then measure them again, you see that what happened during the practice itself is not necessarily predictive of how much learning has actually taken place. So even for ourselves, you know, thinking of ourselves as guinea pigs, it's a pain in the butt, but it can be a really helpful thing to have those little tiny daily recordings or regular recordings to get a sense of, okay, are we actually gravitating towards practice strategies that make us feel better in the moment, or are we [00:44:00] actually using practice strategies that help us improve meaningfully over time.  

Alexa: And this can be a breath of fresh air to teachers because if you happen to have a lesson where you go, "Well, I had no idea what happened there in terms of did they actually get any better?" 

Well, something probably did happen to unlock something or start sowing a seed. It just, it wasn't as obvious in that moment as it will be two or three weeks down the line. And so I think that also supports the you don't have to chase breakthroughs to be a good teacher every lesson, and I think sometimes we think we should, otherwise we're not doing a good job, and it feeds into that imposter syndrome. Actually, we have to remember that there's a lot that goes on when we're at rest. 

Noa: Related to that, I had a teacher who used to say that if practicing feels easy you're probably doing it wrong. I mean, easy, not physically, yes, it should always be physically more, you know, effortless and, and singing with ease and so forth. But, in terms [00:45:00] of the mental aspect of it and the frustration aspect of it, yeah, like, if we're not struggling, it means that we're either not setting the bar high enough, or we're not testing ourselves, or we're not pushing ourselves to recall tricky things as much as we could. 

Alexa: You have some wonderful, wonderful videos on your YouTube channel, amongst other incredible resources that I highly recommend every listener and watcher to go and check out. I was really sad I couldn't get through, like, the months of research or years of material that you have for us to consume, so that will be me for the next however long. 

Can you explain inter-trial intervals and about rest times? What is a good amount of time to have between a repetition or between an instruction, and how that might actually look in a one-hour singing lesson?  

Noa: Yeah. You know, it's a tricky thing in lessons because time is so limited, [00:46:00] and the focus oftentimes isn't so much practice so much as it's trying to identify how to help the student overcome certain challenges that they weren't able to solve themselves in their own practice. 

But the intertrial interval is just how much time passes between repetitions. And so for me, this is more critical in practice sessions perhaps than in lessons 'cause oftentimes, you know, going back to that horrifying video of me practicing, my intertrial interval was zero. Like, there was no stopping at all from one repetition to the next. 

It was just on a loop over and over and over and over. Almost like aggressively so, where, like, I was cutting myself off before I even got to the end of the phrase. I mean, we've probably had this happen in lessons too, right? Where, like, we're trying to give an instruction, even before we're done saying the instruction, like, the student wants to, like, start again. 

So for ourselves in our own practice session, it's really important, as it turns out, for there to be a little bit of a pause in between repetitions. Not for us to just, like, stand there and count [00:47:00] to five, but for us to actually think about, again, okay, what just happened? Why did that happen? What am I trying to do in the first place? What adjustments could I make that might help me get closer that I'd like to test out and see if it does get me closer, it gets me further away, or maybe it changes nothing at all? And that thinking process does take time. So it's not so much that we need to count time so much as it's we need to give ourselves space to reflect and then plan the next repetition. And I think if we do that, then the intertrial interval just takes care of itself. 

The other related thing is making sure that we give ourselves a little bit of time randomly throughout practice or between various sets of repetitions to just pause for a moment and just clear our mind and just stand or sit there for a little bit. 

And not necessarily plan or think in any concrete sort of way, but just, you know, take a couple deep breaths mindfully, perhaps pay attention to our [00:48:00] surroundings or breathe in some air, just to kind of reset a little bit. And this seems like a trivial thing, but there's an interesting study, I don't remember if I made a video about it or not, but there's definitely a blog post associated with it, where researchers found that these pauses were some of the key moments where learning seemed to take place. 

It wasn't that learning took place when we were in the act of performing a skill. They take place in the pauses between our attempts. These pauses that they had were basically 10-second pauses where the participant just kind of sat there thinking about nothing in particular before resuming the skill. 

And what they found is that the brain kind of replays, they called it neural replay, the brain kind of replays the skill, activates the same parts of the brain that are involved in actually performing the skill, like, over and over and over really quickly, and it had nothing to do with imagery or visualization 'cause the participants weren't visualizing the skill, they [00:49:00] weren't practicing the skill internally. 

They're just sitting there thinking about nothing, just waiting. So the brain seems to kind of do this on its own, and that seemed to be associated with greater skill advancement, skill development. So it's not clear from, like, this one study alone or from the research in this area what the exact protocol should be. Like, every X minutes or every X repetitions, it, it was sort of random. 

So for us as well, who knows if 10 seconds is ideal or 5 or 15, but 10 seconds is what they looked at in the study. So the idea is every so often, maybe even in lessons just as a habit to cultivate so students start to model that, just take a breath or two, pause, and then resume with the repetitions or the attempts to try to solve that particular issue or problem solve it, troubleshoot it. 

And yeah, this seemed to, to do quite a lot and, and musicians have experimented with this a little bit, and it seems that they've anecdotally found it to be beneficial as well to clear the mind in that sort of way. 

Alexa: In your opinion and experience, what makes a teacher go [00:50:00] from being excellent to exceptional? 

Noa: You know, when I reflect back on all the teachers that I've had, and I was uniquely fortunate to have a number of teachers all along the way, whether it was some of my earliest teachers or the more advanced teachers, there were so many unique differences in their approaches, in what they had to offer. 

Some, for instance, were invaluable when it came to technique, others more on the expressive side of things. Some just had more of a focus on quality of sound or various different details of music making and different approaches to it and different things to think about and so forth. 

But I think I was fortunate to have teachers who I got the sense, going back to what we talked about earlier, I do feel like I got the sense that they all believed a lot in my potential, and so however critical they might have been, and even [00:51:00] when I definitely remember having days where I felt pretty terrible that I could not meet those expectations or I seemed to have disappointed them a little bit, mostly my fault because I wasn't very good at practicing consistently, I don't think I ever at least intuited from them, got the sense that I shouldn't believe in myself, if that makes sense. 

Like, I always got the sense that they believed in me, they knew better than I did because they had seen all sorts of students pass through over the years. They knew the field. So for me, I don't know that I ever questioned my capacity. In fact, that was probably a strength of mine. I always believed in my capacity. 

I didn't follow through often action-wise in terms of preparation, and that was an insecurity, but the capacity or the belief in my capacity was always there, and I think it's largely due to my s- my teachers. 

So for me, that would make them capable of [00:52:00] cultivating exceptional students because when all the students feel that way it doesn't mean that we're all going to succeed at the same level necessarily, but they always communicated a sense that, like, I could continue to get better. 

And I think as long as I felt like I can get better, even if it wasn't always easy, it made it easier to continue to strive for better. And so I imagine and they've all had really great track records with their students. So I think whatever it is that all of us achieved, I want to think it's largely because we didn't give up on ourselves and we always continued to strive for more. 

Alexa: Can you tell us about Bulletproof Musician?  

Noa: Sure, yeah. So once upon a time when blogging was not as much of a thing, I decided it would be fun to play with websites, and so I think this is maybe 2009, started writing about different aspects of practice, and dealing with nerves, and preparation for performances. 

And, uh, over time it [00:53:00] accumulated. I started writing weekly. Now there are 600-and-something articles mostly based on research, articles that give us little tiny bite-sized tips on how to practice a little smarter, and make a little more progress, and perform more effectively when it really matters. And I also started a podcast some years ago, so there are audio versions of this as well. 

I've taken a bit of a hiatus on the podcast here this year. They're still long-form interviews with well-known researchers and performers, and even some folks from sports and so forth. And earlier this year I decided, because everyone spends so much time on YouTube and sometimes a picture really is worth more than a thousand words, started trying to translate these articles into YouTube-friendly format. 

So there are videos, there's audio, and of course good old text for folks who still like to read words on screens.  

Alexa: It's a brilliant, brilliant resource, so thank you so much for all the time that you've put into that. I'm learning [00:54:00] loads and love the topics. And thank you for coming on to our podcast to chat about this. It's really interesting. 

Where can our listeners and watchers find out more about you and continue to follow your work?  

Noa: I think the easiest place is bulletproofmusician.com, and if you wanna stay up to date and get a new practice hack every Sunday morning at 4:00 AM Eastern there's a newsletter which will distribute that and let you know about any courses that are coming up as well. 

Alexa: Lovely. Noa Kageyama, you're a legend. Thanks so much for today.  

Noa: Sure thing. Thanks for having me.