The Fourforty (440) with Eric Branner

Anne Katherine Davis on MLT, Audiation, and the Science of Musical Thought

• Eric Branner • Season 2 • Episode 26

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Anne Katherine Davis teaches piano from Mexico to students and teachers across the world.  Her approach is unlike what you’ll find in standard method books. Grounded in Edwin Gordon's Music Learning Theory, Anne is passionate about audiation: the idea that real musicianship is thinking in music, not about it. In this episode, she and Eric unpack why the 'eyes before ears' approach has dominated piano pedagogy for decades, what the science says about musical aptitude and its development window, and how movement, immersion, and variety are the real building blocks of musical fluency. Whether you're a curious piano teacher or a lifelong learner, this conversation is for you.

Learn more about Anne's work here.

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SPEAKER_00

It's musical thought. That's it. It's thinking and music. That's all audition means. Now, the specifics of it in his research are that his analogy is the audition is to music, what thought is to language. So here's that language learning model coming in again. That if as I'm speaking to you, I don't have a script, I don't know what I'm going to say next, but I do think about it right before I say it.

SPEAKER_02

Welcome to the 440. I'm your host, Eric Brenner, musician, educator, and founder of Voluntez, the platform that helps music teachers run thriving studios. My guest today is Ann Catherine Davis, pianist, educator, and one of the most thoughtful voices I know in online music teaching. Ann lives in Mexico, teaches 100% online, and works across early childhood music, classical piano, improvisation, and teacher mentoring. Her work is deeply informed by the research of Edwin E. Gordon and music learning theory, and she brings a rigorous, reflective lens to how students learn music. Anne's path into music wasn't linear, and that's part of what makes this conversation so powerful. We talk about curiosity, research, independence, and what it really means to take learning seriously as a teacher. I'm thrilled to share this conversation with you. Hello, Ann. Welcome here again.

SPEAKER_00

I'm so glad to be here. Thank you so, so much.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. And uh we do just for for people listening, just in full honesty, we uh we had a technical glitch. We spent an hour talking and it was amazing last month. And for all of our all of our technological wizardry, we just couldn't get it to work. So we're back here again with a whole new conversation.

SPEAKER_00

There we go. It's like, I'm sorry, but I'm not sorry. I think you understand. Yes.

SPEAKER_02

It's a win-win for everybody involved. Yeah. So how are you doing? What's going on this week, Ann?

SPEAKER_00

Uh, it's it's a busy week. I've I've got like this interview with you and uh my next teacher training group meetings that I do on Zoom. I think I have 11 countries representing this time around. It starts this week, also. We're doing MLT stuff, Gordon stuff, of course. It's all all of my meetings online for these teachers are always MLT focused in some way. This one's about technique. And um, I've got two new students that got it on board this week, too, I think. I'm waiting for the the green light from them, so I'm excited about that. But it's like a big week. Everything happens in one week, and then there'll be like several weeks of nothing, right? That's just what life feels like.

SPEAKER_02

It's a hustle of it's a hustle week, and that's wonderful. And if you're listening to this and you're a piano teacher, you probably know Ann's work already because you're everywhere in all the piano teacher groups, and everyone knows you. And you're I really appreciate over the last couple of years of getting to know you how quickly you would come into these conversations and so patiently and so kindly offer really reflective, introspective advice and ideas about pedagogy. And what I loved about first learning about you is about how there was so much, you had the science-backed approach about how you so there's a joyful element, but there was also this kind of like, well, this is actually scientifically how people learn. And that's a new thing. That's a new thing in the last, to me, recent years in pedagogy. And I love that. And it's been it's really great and it's really well received. So thank you for doing that.

SPEAKER_00

Thank you. But think, especially the kind remark. It in an online world, I think, especially takes work to be kind. So I'm glad that I'm I'm working to be kind. I do mean that sincerely. But I you you and I both know that receiving new things, uh, trying to give new things in the online format, it can be a hostile environment. It can be tough. Which I mean, it can be tough face to face too. I I know that too very well. But I think online especially can be very difficult to communicate clearly and try to connect with people. It's possible. Is this what I do a hundred percent now? I used to teach in person, I am now a hundred percent online because of COVID, like the stories for so many other teachers out there. So yeah, I I got into online thinking, oh, this isn't gonna work. I didn't like forums very much, and you know, jokes on me. Here I am, what, uh six years in now, and it's great. You just gotta know how to use it.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, and you're not only and you're teaching from paradise online. So I'm sure that has to help a little bit that you're you're in Mexico and you're helping people all over. That's a that's a great part of your of your through line.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, no, I I was a little girl in Southern California, and then my family moved all over the place. I don't come from a musical background at all. My parents don't come from musical backgrounds, but I I believe there's untapped musical potential in my parents, interestingly, especially my mom. But I I begged for lessons and got told no. Just over and over again, no. And so I started on like the sweet little, what do you call it, the mountain dulcimer that lays across the lab. Yes. And I was, you know, a four and five-year-old with that little instrument. I made my own songs, I harmonized them myself, I sang songs about spiders and sharks and things that scared me usually. I I was kind of a bloodthirsty child, I guess. I liked scary songs, but I thought were scary songs. That's what I did as a little one. And then uh not until I was eight years old and living in the big woods of Wisconsin, I had like a Laura Ingalls upbringing. I was homeschooled, K through 12, and that was when I finally received a piano and my first piano teacher, and it was just it was seismic from my perspective anyway. And I think my parents too, like they weren't expecting I I knew I wanted to do it. I had not seen other children play piano. I didn't have adults in my life who modeled piano playing, but I don't know how I got this idea. I wanted it, I knew I was gonna be good at it, and I was. And so, long story short, I I've got grad degrees and piano performance. I went to University of Missouri Columbia and then out into Boston at Boston Conservatory, and eventually ended up in Central Mexico of all places, and right before lockdown. Like I left the country in 2019 and uh basically had like a year off. I was like, I don't know what direction life is going, you know, at this point, but I'm not teaching, I'm not performing right now, just reassessing things. And the lockdown happens, and I'm sure like what happened to you, and for so many, is that you get families calling you. It's like, hey, everyone's online. Can you be online? We miss you, and we want you. We want you. It was not a for me, it's never been online as convenient. I get to reach people who don't have teacher options, who don't have the options at all. Not even like teacher preference, but they could be living somewhere remote like I was in Wisconsin as a child. If I could have been my teacher to my little self, like you know, from Mexico to Wisconsin, I would have changed my life. I really would have.

unknown

You would have.

SPEAKER_00

It's exciting to think about. But yet, because I do a researched approach and a specific research approach. People know that about me. And so I I get this wonderful variety of my child has dyslexia, or someone is neurodivergent, or there are obstinate behavior issues with their other teachers, and they can't find someone to click with personality. And so it's not so much me who's like magically making that happen, it's the fact that I'm using neuro research to help me understand each individual. So it's like a puzzle. It's incredibly satisfying work because I get to meet such a variety of people, and we get to make beautiful progress, beautiful music and expression with very little children and older children, adults, all people, all types, all ages, no matter what their background is, no matter what their goals are, because I can solve the puzzle each time of what do they need? What are they thinking? And I I know the tactics to learn how they're thinking and how to help them think more fluently in music.

SPEAKER_02

And it really is almost like a you have this passion for music that we have as a teacher, and you have this ability and this skill set that comes from your work of studying not just music but MLT, but also the background of living in a rural place. And you just said, Oh, if I if I would have had me, or and that's I think that's kind of that offers a profound bit of intuition or insight, excuse me, because you you start to see we all have this real unique background that brings us to what we're doing now and our skill sets and our curiosity and how deep we go into learning something. But it's great that that folds into your online persona, is that I can reach anybody anywhere. And there's people who don't have access to this, but they do. And so I think that's that's a that's a really great perspective, especially for people listening, is that you you follow the thing that you do and it just kind of works out. You end up in Mexico and you have a bunch of students, and the pandemic will happen, so we'll force people online.

SPEAKER_00

It's like things just kind of it was all a masterminded plan, you know.

SPEAKER_02

No, no, you can't plan the really cool stuff that happens. And it's really it's really great that that you came to that. And I I'm just gonna just dive right in and just ask because I know so many people when they first talk to you, they're just like, What is up? Why am I hearing so much about MLT? Okay, what's up with this Edwin Edwin E. Gordon guy? What's the story? How is this because this is the backbone of the support of your pedagogy? Is that correct? Would you say that's true?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, that is the research. Yeah. It's the starting point. I I found Gordon's work. It's this big book. I actually brought it out just for show and tell. That red thing. Learning sequences and music. This is like his um, I don't know what you want to call it, compendium, his handbook, even though it's just so big and kind of heavy. But he does a I think he does a great job of summing up his research in that book. So I do recommend that book to anybody new, wanting to read it. It's slow going at first. Probably what excited me the most when I found this in 2012. And this is the 2012 edition. I think that's how it came across my attention that way. It was getting advertised a bit like, oh, new updated edition. I was like, what is this? And looked into like, oh, this is brilliant. Where has this been on my life? But in the back of the book, he's got a little bibliography where he cites other people's work. And it goes back, Eric. Let me, this stuff goes back. It's like you think, oh, groundbreaking new research, but as is so often the case in the field of science, like nothing's truly new, yes. And it goes back to older ideas. This goes back to Plato. Plato asked, how does a person learn? And I'm paraphrasing, of course, but he asked, how did a person how does a person learn something new when encountering a new thing, an unfamiliar thing? How does a person do that? He asked that question. Like, how is the brain going to grapple with something it's never encountered before and make sense of it? That's the foundation in Western science traditions of learning theories right there. There are so many learning theories out there. I've never counted them. I mean, I'm I'm scared to put a number. There's probably more than 20. There's probably more than 30 learning theories out there. And Gordon's is a music learning theory. So he's obsessed with how does the brain process new things as well as old things? And does it compare the two or does it not? And all these really basic questions that you would think music educators should know. Yes. I think I think everyone should know these things.

SPEAKER_02

It sure seems and when was he doing this work? Was he a musician first?

SPEAKER_00

He was a musician first. He went to Eastman. He was a bass player, upright bass, classical pian classical bass player, and got to tour with the Gene Krupa band, which is fantastic. And one of the things he so admired about Gene was that when Gene wasn't looking at him, he would yell at him, Ed, I can hear that you're not moving back there. Because this rhythm is not right. You're just you're a little too boxed and a little too squared. But if you will move, then it's going to affect the rhythm. Because I can hear it, then you're playing, that you're not jiving back there with the rest of the band. And that set him on that path of, okay, well, how much is movement really necessary for understanding music? And we've got answers and a lot of research that, yeah, it's entirely necessary. You cannot teach rhythm separate from movement. It happens in our motor cortext. You can even ask people who study brains if you present them with a professional musician brain and don't tell them that they're looking at the brain of a musician, they will say, Oh, that's a musician. There are obvious visual markers on the brain, and one of them is the size of the motor cortex in musicians. It's big, it's much larger than people who don't study music. When we hear rhythm, we don't just hear it, we process it physically in a feeling of movement. So, yeah, Gordon went into these questions of, okay, so who studied movement? Well, maybe that would be Dalcro's. But then he dug deeper and is realizing, oh no, that would be Rudolf Laban. And so all the Laban studied movements, if you don't know who that is, as a Hungarian dancer and movement theorist and choreographer. And Laban is like mapped out every possible movement that the human body can do. And Gordon studied that and had brain scans to go with movement activities. And he made aptitude tests. His are the gold standard music aptitude tests used worldwide, and they're even used in many, many schools in the USA. It's just a lot of people don't know that they get used. Often private schools make use of them, but you'll see them in public school usage too. And they'll group children according to, oh, this one's got a high rhythmic aptitude. I'm gonna put him on drums for the ensemble, and this one's got a high tonal aptitude, and I'm gonna put her over here with the clarinets, you know, things like that.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, I was gonna ask you that. So the brain processes rhythm using the motor neural cortex, is what you're saying. And yeah, what about melody? Is that how is that? Is that different?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, it's more complicated. It is more complicated. Rhythm is a visceral, more concrete experience. Pitch is a more abstract thing. I mean, you think about it, like we play higher pitches, we say higher, but it's a faster frequency, right? That's moving, but a lower pitch is a slower frequency. And so we use in English anyway, we use the terms high and low. And most languages do that also. So it's a more abstract thing. And there is, I should have brought it with me a year ago, I think now. I think it's just a year old. There is a groundbreaking study that just came out that we have finally localized in the brain a precise part that processes musical pitch. And we had not found that before now, which is just so it's still going on. Oh, it's still going on, it's still expansive. And but that study and studies like that confirm what Gordon was doing in the 60s. But yeah, this things like aptitude go back to the 20s, I believe, might be even be earlier than that, with seashore, and then things like learning theories, gestalt theory, if you've heard of that one, is what 1900s Germany, I think. So it things like the brain sees patterns and we love to categorize things. And when we see something unfamiliar, we compare it to the familiar. And so, depending on what your background is, if you have more familiar stuff that's loosely connected to an unfamiliar thing, you're gonna learn that faster than the next person who has a very different vocabulary of what they consider familiar in their life and in their brain. So things like this can help me connect with each child. If if a child, for example, shows up with very musical parents, a musical background. Typically that child can hear the difference between major and minor tonality when they start with me. But it shouldn't be surprising to us, and yet it is that when we get these students who don't come from musical backgrounds and they're as old as, you know, eight or nine, and you can like play a major song for them or a major chord, and then switch it to something else, augmented, minor, and they'll look at you like it's the same, there's no difference. And that can freak us out. Like, what do you mean you don't hear the di don't? This is all completely unfamiliar. You've got to give them an immersion and familiarity first before you can introduce one at a time unfamiliar concepts.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, yeah. What about tone?

SPEAKER_00

Tone also, yeah.

SPEAKER_02

So like what about creating a beautiful sound and having an opinion about because I feel like that's so important.

SPEAKER_00

And being able to sing in tune. Like, what is in tune also? Like the pianos, you know, inflamm infamously are never in tune, right? We do quite slight of, but no, really, like the tuning system for pianos is uh it's developed over time also. Thirds on the piano are not as pure as, say, a what a choir can do with the way they sing and they can tune in that way too. Gordon identified, I believe, 20 areas of aptitude, but he worked on developing his tests to only focus on two, which is rhythm and tonal. Since those are the two like biggest things we're kind of concerned about as musicians. But he hypothes Hypothesized, and I think more so than that, things like register, timbre, tone, harmony, harm harmony, a harmonic aptitude. Uh, Dr. Eric Rasmussen, his work on harmonic learning sequences, which is a little bit of a riff and a title on Gordon's learning sequences in music. He is an MLT teacher and researcher. He's done wonderful work on harmony. And because of his stuff, I have children. My own child, I'll just brag about him. He's two and a half now. He can sign to me with his fingers. He'll he'll do this for yes, like a nodding head, and he'll shake his finger and wag it for no. And we use Eric Rasmussen's terms yes and no for tonics and dominates. He's two and a half. He's been doing that since he was about 14 months old. So he can identify in major and minor, tonics and dominants, he can also sing back to me the central tone, the tonic root, the resting tone, is the term many educators know. That's what I like to call it too. Of any tonality, Eric, he can do all seven tonalities of Western fine art music. If I sing in Locrian, and we do sing in Locrian for our brain apt to our brain audiation development, my two and a half year old will sing back to me the correct pitch that is the tonic root of that tonight.

SPEAKER_02

Of Locrian.

SPEAKER_00

Of Locrian, yep. And Aeolian and Dorian. Which is the seventh for people listening.

SPEAKER_02

That's the seventh mode. That's pretty intense.

SPEAKER_00

It's weird. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02

So you teach that. You teach the modes as well. And you have or you have your child hear modes as well as part of your own.

SPEAKER_00

We need that because MLT, music learning theory, it shows that we know what something is by what it is not. And this goes back to like gestalt theory, learning theories. This is old, old stuff. That I can't just inundate a beginner in major tonality and duple meter in a method book for like three years and then expect them to understand what major tonality and duple meter is. It's just not how the brain works. That that's working against the brain. The brain compares things and looks for patterns. It loves contrasts and patterns. It craves novelty. So when I sing a major song to a bunch of babies and toddlers, and when we play major music in my piano lessons with six and seven-year-olds on up, we also change it immediately to triple meter and to harmonic minor and to Dorian and to mixolydian. So when you have an understanding of what mixolydian sounds like, it actually reinforces your prior understanding of what major tonality sounds like and how it behaves and functions. So the more variety, the better. The more musical you are.

SPEAKER_02

So are you comfortable? And I I it's just so interesting. I've been learning about this and hearing about it, but never really I'm so excited that we're diving into it here. And when you're so as a teacher, you're comfortable away from the instrument, taking a melody and taking a major key melody and moving it into Dorian or Phrygian.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

As like right now, like not a that's part of the training. Because I've what's going to happen is people are listening, and I know how a lot of piano teachers work. You know, it's this is it's interesting because it's a very guitaristic thing. Guitar players spend so much time just playing scales because that's how we that's how that pedagogy is was commonly done for so long. But To be able to actually do it is probably maybe scary for a piano teacher that you know that learned traditionally and that might be teaching in a traditional format because that's that's not how method books work, right? No, in general.

SPEAKER_00

How do method books work? They work through the eyes and not the ears. Yeah. That that we've had this terrible, terrible change in our music learning history. Probably went down about the 50s, but maybe a little sooner than that. That we moved from believing that music was an oral art form to a visual one. It's a strange, strange thing to think about. And when we do that, then we over-theorize too, right? Like if I say, you know, the seventh mode, it's tempting to think in very theoretical terms of like, oh, it's got a lowered fifth and a lowered third. And like that's just not how musicians think in the moment when they're making music. It isn't. And that's a big part of Gordon's work. I I should summarize very briefly that because it's a music learning theory, one of the things that Gordon came across, and it's probably the crux of his whole research, is that a music learning theory is highly similar to a language learning theory. That's what he discovered. That is his breakthrough work that, like Suzuki talking about the mother tongue, this is again not a new concept, but Gordon wanted to prove it. It's like, well, what's the science for it? And I think that he has proven it. There are still people out there who want to argue that, well, music isn't a language, so it shouldn't be compared. I'm like, well, but but that that's half true, right? Because music isn't a language, correct? But it is like a language. That's what's important about it. It functions syntactically, it has a grammar of its own and a vocabulary of its own. But thankfully, it isn't actually a language. Because if it were, I would be bored and I wouldn't be doing this for my life. I wouldn't. If I could talk about music and find that to cover 100% of what music means, then why on earth would I be into music? Like why? Music is beyond what words can do. Music does things differently than what words can do. And we know this scientifically too, right? Like stroke victims, even different uh autisms, have been treated with music therapy. And that if we can get them to sing after we immerse them in music, it can actually restore speech in the mind and in the muscles and and coordination of the person who's had, say, a stroke. It's amazing that it's not speech therapy that reaches people like that. It's music therapy because it actually bypasses our more literal thinking, our language center, I guess I could say something like that. Music is a deeper thing. Music is something, it's an aspect of being human that language can't fulfill on its own. But is it like a language? Yes, absolutely. It does behave similarly to a language. And so the learning of it that Gordon puts forward then is the same sequence of learning that, say, a baby goes through. They're born into a culture and a language. And I mean, just like you have done with your kids, and I hope everyone on the planet has done with their kids. They didn't wait for their kid to speak before they were spoken to. Yes? That would not be as smart. That doesn't work. We know that the baby isn't gonna talk back. We know that the baby can't understand everything I'm saying, and yet what do we say to the babies? Oh, you're so cute. Mama loves you so much. Oh, I think you're hungry. Do you feel hungry? Like we have these sentences and structure and tonal inflection and creativity, and we sing songs and lullabies and movement and so on. So they're immersed in a vocabulary of their mother tongue. Same thing with music. Whatever music you're doing, um, you can apply MLT to Indian classical music, you can teach pop, rock, jazz, Chinese, whatever your culture is idiom doesn't matter. Right. But uh the good news is that everybody has a brain, you know. So whatever the medium is, the way the brain learns it is gonna be the way the MLT is laid out. So it's immersion and then babble, baby babble. And I encourage this at the instrument as well. You want random playing, random improv, experimentation, things that can make so many piano teachers, you know, cringe inside. Don't hit my piano. No, we need them to hit the piano. We do, we really need them. Just like with finger painting and making messes, they've gotta make messes with music, also. So they learn, again, you'll hear MLT teachers say this probably too much, that we learn what something is by what it is not. And you just you can't streamline like these methods do out there of this is middle C, now you're gonna learn D like a robot. It's like, why is everything like AI even before it became AI stores? And everything's become so mechanized and not human anymore that we want them to read that, count it for four beats instead of feeling it as we do with rhythm, and having it in a context of well, what is middle C doing? Is it the resting tone? Is it the dominant in F major? Is it gonna be C Dorian? Like, what's happening? There's so many, but we think in context, and we need these differences and variety just like we need in our language learning. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

If you were, so I want to jump around here a little bit. So let's say I brought my a seven-year-old child into your studio, and we're what does the process for the student I mean, I you were explaining some ideas of how it works, but is there a met do you use a method book at that age?

SPEAKER_00

So there is at first I would say as gently as possible at seven is too late. We know, according to Gordon's research, but also, of course, it's peer-reviewed research that I'm talking about. This isn't like some isolated man out on an island somewhere. Like his research is connected to all this other stuff historically, and it's ongoing today. That music aptitude, this is you could call it music potential, the development of how much difficulty it takes for the brain to learn musical concepts. That window of development closes by nine years old. So if you have a complete beginner starting at seven, then I have twenty-four months to get them as immersed in all the tonalities, all the meters, and experimenting, basically like you know, finger painting and so on, all these random experience, seemingly random experiences that someone at two would be doing.

SPEAKER_02

Okay.

SPEAKER_00

So if they and they could be, you know, naturally high aptitude child, and that's fine. But what's still heartbreaking to me and to many MLT teachers is that a high aptitude child could still have developed even higher aptitude if they had started in infancy immersed in music, going to music and toddler classes, singing and moving and improvising with their voice and their body, singing and improvising and moving on an instrument of their choice at five or six years old, and continuing to develop their harmonic sensitivity, I guess you could call it, until about nine. When you hit nine, nine and a half years old, that's the end, Eric. That's it. After that, it's achievement. You are stuck with the abilities that your brain can do. It's not gonna grow anymore. You're not gonna make brand new musical synapses in your brain after the age of nine. This is old, this is like for you and for me, this is bad news.

SPEAKER_02

What would that mean? What would that mean then if you were because I did come from a musical family, but like you, I didn't start playing guitar. I had to play piano, didn't want to, quit. And so I started playing guitar really when I was 13. And like yourself, if you had yourself and you came in at 12, would you be like, oh, here's this high functioning, awesome kid? What where do you start then? So where do you do you where do you begin the 12-year-old?

SPEAKER_00

So you start you start with getting to know, okay, what are they audiating? I guess we should probably define it.

SPEAKER_02

And that yeah, I I was gonna wait to see who said it first.

SPEAKER_00

And then you're like, because that's the key word.

SPEAKER_02

Hangout. It's like right. Here it comes. Yeah. Tell us about audiation.

SPEAKER_00

So audiation, it's a term that was coined by Gordon in the 60s. I think the kind of a fun, I can you tell, like, I love the talk and I could go down too many rabbit trails. I actually don't know if I've completely answered any of your questions yet. So feel free to repeat. But anyway, audience, I believe it was actually used in medicine by someone. I gotta try to find this source again, about anything and everything related to the ear, the auditory cortex, like not just the mechanism, but also the neurons involved, that that was audiation. So I th I found that kind of interesting. Like, oh, somebody else came up with that weird term that like isn't in the dictionary, you know, but not just Gordon. But Gordon has a very specific term in his research, a specific definition. I mean to say, whenever he says audiate or audiation or audiated, like you can go through all the tenses with this. And that is simply that it's musical thought. That's it. It's thinking and music. That's all audition means. Now, the specifics of it in his research are that his analogy is the audience is to music, what thought is to language. So here's that language learning model coming in again. That if as I'm speaking to you, I don't have a script, I don't know what I'm going to say next, but I do think about it right before I say it. Now, does that mean I'm like hearing the words in my mind before I say it? Well, obviously not. Otherwise, we couldn't have a conversation at this speed. I would be needing to plan out each sentence in my brain. Right, that's just not so that gives you already an experience you know that everyone knows how insanely fast thought is. Thought is instantaneous, it's so so quick. And then comprehension is also that after I have said this, you have audiated the meaning to what I've said. And so audiation, just like thought, it happens right before something and right after something. Yes? You can have if I give some kind of dramatic pause, then you can anticipate what I was probably going to say, but that's based on your vocabulary and experiences as an English speaker, yes? So there are all these things coming into style and form and performance and what it means to have a conversation and language. Same thing in music. So if you audiate, well, I'm trying to remember what was our example last time we talked. Oh, was Mary had a little lamb? Yeah, that's what I brought up. Now you already know what that is, and you haven't heard it in your mind when I say that. You've already audated what that is. That's a familiar folk tune. It's done. I could say twinkle, twinkle, little star. I could say London Bridge. I could say something more obscure, like um, I can't even think, oh, Loubi Lou or something. More more obscure folk songs that some people don't know. And at that point, it's like your audience. Like, well, I don't have experience with that, so I can't actually think about that one. But it is not inner hearing. This is the big deal about audiation research. If I had to enter here in order to audiate, like my example I just did earlier with speaking, I wouldn't have time. Yes? It's just not fast enough. It's not that isn't and I'm not mean to say that inner hearing is bad or wrong. That's not what I mean. And it's not what Gordon means. It's simply that people who enter here are not necessarily audiating. But people who audiate may or may not be inner hearing. And it's not necessary for them to audiate. They don't have to enter here in order to audiate. But someone who makes an emphasis, and look, I'll just come out and say it, things like the Kodai approach. I was deeply into Kodai before 2012. And one of the things that drove me bonkers with Kodai was things like the hand symbols of Solfej and the way things translated in far too much of a visual way to this is one beat, that's two beats, this is C on the line, and this is C in the space. And I was like, this is just not how I process things as a musician. I'm pretty sure it's not how musicians that I know and respect process things either, because that's too slow. There's this can't be possible. So when I read his book and Gordon's book in 2012, I was like, yes, audiation is musical thought. It's so fast. And you're either thinking in music or you're thinking about music. That there are only two ways to do this. And thinking about music is not musical thought. Inner hearing is thinking about music. I can think about Mary Had a Little Lamb and hear it in my mind.

SPEAKER_02

That's not audiation.

SPEAKER_00

But it's not audiation. Or I should say it's very low audiation.

SPEAKER_02

Is audiation being present in the moment of unfolding that music as you play it?

SPEAKER_00

Yes, yes, absolutely. There are there are several types and stages of audiation. We can like dig into that probably in a different conversation. But yeah, um, there are different types of audiation and how this works and different stages to it of sophistication. And so, like, for example, a folk musician, they could be maybe they take something like bluegrass or something that has really fantastic virtuosity about it. And we're just in awe, like, how's the banjo? Like, how's he even picking that fast? Like, I just don't know how he's thinking like that. I think that guy is audiating. He may not be able to read any music at all, and he may not be able to tell you if something is major or minor, but he probably thinks in major and minor and maybe even has created his own terms for major and minor. But he is not at the same literacy level of musicianship that he can then talk about it theoretically with someone else. And I found that wonderful to realize that music theory isn't audition, music theory isn't musicianship. That's something that happens much, much later. I can talk about augmented and Dorian and German augmented sixth like all day if you want to, but it's not music, that's just analysis and a way to describe it. Yes, a way to talk about it. But it's it's I mean, it's cool. I love theory, but it isn't music. And theory is put front and foremost in all these method books of count out four beats and identify that C major chord, you know. But if you play it, can they hear it? Can they tell you, is that the same as this other chord or is it different? And like that's the beginning of audience right there, of same versus different. I'm doing these little like with my young kids, it's the same hands or is it different hands? So I'll I'll play different things on the piano or I'll sing different patterns and ask them, did what I say something like bum and then my next pattern, bum bum, bum, was that the same or different? And like it can be shocking how many people look at you. I think those are different. And it can take a while to develop just that part of the audiation muscle. And once you establish that there are differences, then you take it a further step of okay, now we're gonna hold on to the resting tone. And you do things like sing Mary Had a Little Lamb and freeze in the middle of the song and stare at the kid like, where is it? Where's Doe? Where was the resting tone? and see if they'll come back and be able to hold on to that center pitch the whole time. So that that's some of the activities I'm explaining of MLT. But um I should be careful and and again say that to understand MLT is to know what it is not. We know what something is by why it is not, and that is that it is not a method. It's not a method at all. There is a method, um, multiple methods. Here's the piano one music moves for piano, and this is the application of the research into piano teaching. And there's the jump right in series for band instruments, and you you know they've got the new guitar method again. Yes, they do. Audiate. It's an exclamation point, yeah. Audiate exclamation point.

unknown

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Um I was I was gonna title today's episode Ann Talks Me Into Adopting the Audiate method for my guitar studio. You're doing great.

SPEAKER_00

One of the things you'll find when you open that book is like these activities of resting tone games and pattern activities and so on, and you'll be tempted, like I was, I think. Maybe I shouldn't assume. I think most everyone is tempted to look at that and say, oh, this is Gordon. This is what Gordon must be. And it's not. That's the methodical application of his research. All his research is asking and examining and answering is what does the brain do when it processes music? How does it learn music? Plate Plato's question. How does it learn new concepts and music? What does the brain do when processing that? And look, Gordon, like, he got to meet with Suzuki and show him this stuff. Suzuki hated it. He absolutely did not like Suzuki.

SPEAKER_02

Oh, he wasn't a fan.

SPEAKER_00

No, no. Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_02

I can imagine that.

SPEAKER_00

It's like he he um I can't remember what it's called. Oh, the talent, talent education. Talent, what is it called? It was Suzuki's belief that everyone can be trained to the same amount of talent, no matter who they are and where they're born. And of course, you know, Gordon's aptitude tests are showing that each brain is different. Like some people are born with crazy high rhythm and crazy low tonal. Some are like happily in the average, it's like two points apart, you know, in separation, and all these variations in between, right? And and then, you know, you get somebody who's like in the 90th something percentile for rhythm and pitch. And you're like, oh gosh, we've got a savant. Like that's just that's not a common result in aptitude testing that that happens.

SPEAKER_02

So maybe what Suzuki really was meaning is that the average person can do a lot through this method, which I I think that's what he meant.

SPEAKER_00

Yes. And that's I it's heartbreaking to me because I wish I think they met only the one time. And I think that there was a lot of communication difficulty of trying to say that too. What this is and how it works. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Oh, so let me let me jump in another direction really quick. Everyone who I've met who was a big fan of MLT, and I have quite a few friends now, including yourself, that are really inspired by it, really interested in it, I don't think any of them learned it as children before the age of nine. So my question is, because when you said that, I was like, well, okay, forget that, I'm out. Like, what's the if I if I can't personally benefit and become a better guitar player from this, why would I? But you can't.

SPEAKER_01

My question is still Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

So if I'm discovering this thing, and let's say I'm sitting down today and I'm playing a piece by Targa that I'm it's a new piece of music or an old piece of music, maybe that I'm I'm pulling out to practice. Would this, as as I'm learning these skills, would this change my practice in the practice room for how I say would play classical guitar? Or maybe how I would play bluegrass, which I also play. Like how could this inform an adult learner, and in my case, a pretty high-level player? How would that it impact my practice session today? Yes. I'm gonna learn Capricho Arabe by Tarek.

SPEAKER_00

So no, um one of so my personal story is I flunked out of my first ever university class in theory. And um I decided, you know, when that happened to me, well, this will never ever happen again. And it put me onto the whole field of research of learning theories. I wanted to know, like, how can I learn this? Because obviously what I did, and mostly it was what I didn't do, you know. I was a freshman, I just didn't want to, mostly. But how could I do things differently next time around? What can I do? And I discovered things like Noah Kajayama and his bulletproof musician practice. Cool, cool guy, by the way. You should just go ask him to come on your podcast next. Yeah. But I would that'd be a great conversation, right? Oh my goodness. But yeah, that was back in um like you know 06, 07, and uh I you know wanted to get better with my brain. And by discovering MLT later in 2012, yes, it will change you because at this point you can improve your audience, you can improve your achievement in musical thinking, but you cannot raise the ceiling of your potential. That's what this means after the age of nine. Yeah. So there you go. Yeah. So it's it's the difference between potential and achievement. And it that's a huge field of research, just in and of its own, also. That things like um, oh, if you there's a terrible study done where they put a blindfold over one eye of a kitten when it was born. And I mean, guess what happened? Like I kind of six months later when they took the blindfold off. The kitten was blind in that eye, because since there was no use for those cells to develop according to the brain's perspective, it didn't use it or lose it, right? Um, so was the kitten born with no potential to see out of both eyes? Well, no, it was born with the potential. To see, but it was the potential was removed and developing. And so when I encounter a seven or eight-year-old who comes from no music background, I understand that they've been wearing a blindfold for eight years, and all of a sudden it's taken off for this last brief part of the window where it can develop. It can still develop before they hit nine, nine and a half years old. And I got to run, run, run to try to get as much musical immersion into that kid as I possibly can.

SPEAKER_02

Got it.

SPEAKER_00

So I hope that that helps.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That makes that's a great, that's a great way to to explain it. Yeah. So how am I how would I apply this to my practice? And you know, and I've got all these, you have this, these kind of what are these these lenses of like I'm looking at a I'm looking at a passage this way, and I know what the scale is. I know how many sharps there are and it's starting on the thirds, you know. So I start to hear these things, like not auditing, but I when I've look at a piece of music, I start hearing what I think it should sound like.

SPEAKER_00

And that's probably you are probably auditing already. You just we don't have the term for it. Right, right, right. Self-analyze quite yet. Um, I'm trying to think like what's a a really quick, rewarding example we can do. Probably with rhythm is the easiest way in to feel this. Is um if you were presented something like something famous, if I were to play Fur Elise for you right now. Okay, sure. That just perfect. I've never heard of them. Yeah. Oh, yes, just brand new. Yeah, it's brand new. If um you know how young pianists play that piece who were not audiating at a high level. If they start playing this thing, like if they're going, I don't even know if I've got yeah, I've got original sound on. They're like, oh, I don't. So there's no phrasing happening. Yeah? They're like beat, beat, beat, no, incident. That that there's this dot, that dot. And because they've been taught to read before they can audiate, before they can think in music. And so they're executing dot and they're not hearing phrases and structure and so on. So for Elise, it starts on an upbeat, but you wouldn't know it if it were played that way that I just did. But if you were moving to a recording of it, say, um, like all these, and that's something that you know I admired with Kodai and Suzuki and Orf and all these sound before symbol approaches, they love their recording libraries and CDs and professional level performing and modeling, and we want to be doing that for kids. So if they're hearing something like then if you're moving to it side to side wherever you find the largest beat, then you can feel it doesn't start on a bu. It starts on a da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da.

SPEAKER_02

Got it. And so this is where the movement becomes part of the practice at any age.

SPEAKER_00

Yes. And so any age that you're moving, and Gordon calls that the macro beat, the largest beat that you feel. And so however that's written, 3-8, 3-4, I don't care how it's written. I'm gonna be feeling wherever that biggest beat is, dee-ta-do, ta dee-ta-do, ta-da.

SPEAKER_02

So it's more important to feel it first as opposed to just looking at the score. Got you.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, yeah. And then you will move when your audiation develops, then you will see a score, and you don't have to physically move because you'll be moving on the inside. That you will be audiating very quickly, instantaneously, that oh, I know how that feels, just by glancing at it. Uh these are like the best sight readers on the planet, right? Where like you could put a score in front of them, they're like, Oh, I know what to do, because that's a notational audiation that they're doing, that they can see it and they know how it transcribes into the body and into sound. So that's an easy way to feel that no matter how it's written, if the largest beat is written as um the half note or something in there, and yet the time signature says four four, then no, it's not four beats. It's not four impulses per measure that you're feeling. I'm feeling each half bar as it starts to organize the hierarchy of where is the musical feel? Where is the happening? And so that is a great example, I think, of sound instead of visuals happening. And Times and Nicatures are such an archaic holdover from dance music and stuff, they're mostly meaningless. I don't know any pro musician who looks at you know a Bach Zig and thinks, oh, let me check. Is it in 6'8? Which is we don't. We know the idiom, we know the style, we know it's what to expect. And it's like, I'm gonna play this fast because it's a jig. Here we go.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, let me another. I have so many questions. I want to make sure that have I get three more out. So MLT, let's so I'm studying with you, I'm learning MLT, I'm building all this. How does ML because I know in guitar, when you especially in classical guitar, so much of the development is just like technique because so many people want to play like Spanish music or you know, really flashy stuff. How do you, as an MLT teacher, bring because I know that for instance, you know, a lot of the stuff we do to develop speed is to play very slowly and to break things into section or to take to take uh uh straight eights and to swing them to allow some of the notes to be there's all these like that one.

SPEAKER_00

I really hate that one.

SPEAKER_02

Oh, it's good for bluegrass. It it it helps. Well, and that's an idea of physical tension and relaxation. And but these are but these are which how does MLT you hate it, how does MLT like approach these, like these conventional ways of developing technique in a player?

SPEAKER_00

Wonderfully, audiation solves about 98% of what everybody perceives to be a technical problem, which is bizarre for us to think about. But if you audiate, meaning if you think in music, just like you think in language, you are thinking in large groups of meaning, large groups of meaning. You're not just gonna thinking, oh, this is a tonic that goes to the subdominant, that goes to the supertonic, and then ooh, there's something spicy like a secondary dominant, and then we finally get a dominant and we return to the tonic. That is still too fragmented, even though I wish like that was more common, even just that level in method books out there, especially for piano. I'm talking that these little guys can audiate half cadences and whole phrases from a very, very young age when they are thinking musical ideas. And so when they are first given their recorded performance to listen to, or I model something, it's a sound before symbol approach. These children can play entire phrases of music without reading a single note, and they'll add their own harmony to it, like in the left hand at the piano. And they'll look at me like wickedly and be like, I'm gonna drop all the F sharps, Miss Ann, because I want it to be mixedolydian today. I'm like, okay, fine, go ahead. So they are so musical that they think in big chunks. Big chunks. So, same thing also when there is technical thing, because it's not always gonna be solved by audiation, but almost always it will solve that. For piano, for example, I won't speak to guitar. My own experiences are my my little uh uh mountain dulcimer, later a hammered dulcimer, and um what else did I have? I think that's oh, I did I did Suzuki violin for a few years also. But that's it. Piano is my is my jam. When we play fast on the piano, you can't practice slowly, click up the metronome two notches, and then practice it at that next tiny, tiny level, and then get it to the speed you want. If you do that, and Noah Kachiyama talks about this, I think it's for hockey players about the speed of smacking the puck into the net versus accuracy. Slow practice is just accurate practice, it involves like abductors in the fingers. If we don't move the same way and at a slow speed, then we do at a fast speed. And so solving technical issues can look like, for example, uh I you know you have to have knowledge of physiognomy and and how how the body works. You need to have a little bit of anatomy knowledge to get this right when there is a true technical problem, which is rare, at least in my experience, and in many other MLT teachers' experiences too, that if we want to get something up to speed, first of all, we never would have practiced it slowly to begin with. That just never would have happened because they they audiate at such a fast level, they know where the notes are on their instrument. They already know how their fingers are going to move to get there away from the instrument before they've even tried it. And so they they learn their repertoire at a s a ludicrous speed, Eric. Like when it gets to the point after about three years of study, if they start off me at four, let's say, by the time they're seven years old, I can give them like early classical level playing, like their first Clementi sonatina, some rhinogle, maybe even one of the very easy Anna Magdalena Bach notebook things like the DM bounces back and forth. And they can learn it without me showing them anything about it. Like I just give them the piece and they come back the next week playing it. I don't have to suffer that common issue of like you missed the F sharp, you missed the F sharp. Oh, careful, count two beats right here, because we don't think on such micro levels. We think in in big chunks. So they learn physically very quickly. If there's some technical issue trying to get up to speed, you can do things like break it into a chunk. I think you mentioned that, yeah. Of a small gesture, and then you want to examine the gesture needed to get between those two chunks. What is it that's holding up? So you've got to be able to analyze with muscles where does this muscle movement stop? Where is the next muscle movement begin? And then what is the musical move? The music move, which is why I love the title of this.

SPEAKER_02

The musical move. Yep, okay.

SPEAKER_00

What's gonna happen? What do I need to happen before that? So we can play that and stop, practice the movement in between incredibly quickly, as fast as we can, and then start the next movement. And so that's practicing fast slowly is what I like to call it. Yes, breaking it into the state. But you're still using that that muscle twitch that athletes talk about where you're activating the speed that you need and you're practicing the speed that you need. But yeah, doing the whole incremental thing, changing the rhythm, like to swung rhythms and stuff like that, it that works at such a micro level that often the next day your progress is gone and you're starting over again. And then the next day your progress is diminished, perhaps not as greatly, but you're still having to start over again. And so it things like that waste time. We want to be the most efficient with our practicing. So I don't assign dotted rhythms and scales and stuff like that because we don't need to. We really don't need to if the apparatus, the human mechanism, has been trained to respond to the other part of our humanness, which is our brain, in audiation. And so I get to develop both of these ones. And and Gordon does a great job, by the way, at staying out of the human mechanical element. He very carefully was like, I'm gonna deal only with the brain. The rest of you, all y'all out there, whether you're a pianist, a guitarist, an organist, figure it out. Write the methods to apply this research theory, but I'm not gonna get in the way and tell you, oh, you need to play like this as a pianist or like that as a clarinetist or whatever is going on. So people can be frustrated sometimes. Like, well, what does it mean for me as a piano player? And like, you gotta find your MLT piano friends who have been.

SPEAKER_02

You gotta find your thing and how to apply that to what you do. Interesting. And I'm I'm sure that'll also as a teacher that gives you a huge amount of creativity with how you approach who you work with because there's so many ways of it's not doctrine, but it's more you can be really free and try to and using this this new tool, this is a modern day tool of science research, it you know, it shouldn't surprise us, but it still surprises me that when I apply this contemporary knowledge, it doesn't result in something that's foreign.

SPEAKER_00

It actually results in something that's older than what we do today, where my kids are improvising their own cadenzas and they're writing their own ideas. They're little composers and improvisers just like Mozart and Bach and Beethoven and Chopin. I mean, all the way up to like Rachmananoff, and like it seems like he was the last one. It's like ever after that we splintered off and we specialize in pianists who only perform and pianists who only improvise, and pianists who don't really play anymore, but they compose for other pianists. And we don't have this whole human-ness reality of what it means to be a musician anymore. And there are books out there that say, Oh, buy this supplement to teach alongside your method so your kids can improvise. And it's not improvisation, right? It's not, and so audiation unlocks this past for us where we can return to a more traditional way of learning while using the contemporary key to unlock it. Yes, it's been lost, and I do see it making ground. I think we are returning to more full musicianship. We're seeing you know, Van Kleibern winners and so on today in the piano field who also improvise, and that just was not the case for quite some decades.

SPEAKER_02

Are you familiar with the guitarist Augustin Barrios Mangor?

SPEAKER_00

Uh yeah, yeah, I do who know that it is.

SPEAKER_02

Who was a gymnast and a poet. And when you mentioned movement, and and he would compose his cadenzas in the moment while touring Europe and and so and so amazing. He was a contemporary of Segovia, who you hear about a lot more, but that music is so fiery and so explosive. And so and it would and also when you were talking to, I was thinking about people like Miles Davis and like the great, you know, the amazing. Yeah, it seemed like that's they may have clued in that concept.

SPEAKER_00

And look, I do think like still in pop rock today, there's still an improvatory, more full musician thing happening there. Not as much as there used to be, but I there is still something of that culture there. Um yeah, I just the the idea of you know, can I be have I reached my my my zenith as a teacher? Like, no, that's wonderful that I haven't peaked yet because I am teaching things that I was not taught, and seeing how these children grow up around me, they make me better with my own improvisation and my own compositions and things too, because I'm living in their world with them the whole time. And um no, it makes the work so satisfying that I can I get to care about and learn about each individual person, who they are and where they come from. And then it it takes them a while to realize that no, I wrote this piece for you because of your brain, and I want you to give a title to it, and then I'm gonna assign it to your friend to also play that piece. And they they they slowly realize things like, wow, I I have an impact, and I'm six, like I'm a little person, and I I have I can be a musical colleague from very early on. And it's it's really thanks to Gordon and my past teachers for helping me reach the musicianship that I did. Uh it's absolutely a combination that I I reached a high point in music making and I wanted to combine it with a learning theory of how can I disseminate this so that it's not lost. I I don't want I don't want this, there's still this mysticism, you know, like the there are many, many piano professors out there. I I don't care about, oh, am I gonna get in trouble saying it out loud? They all know what I'm talking about, that they want this kind of guru image of their studio, their their people, their students becoming like them, and that they're giving them secrets of the trade. And like, there are no secrets, okay? There are none. Like, we know how the brain learns, we know how music works, and we should be putting those two things together. Sports medicine is a recent field, but not that recent. It's been around for quite some time now. And before it entered the scene, we had injured athletes all over the place, and athletes questioned, how can I do this in a way it's not going to hurt me so I don't decimate my career. And yet, musicians, especially pianists today, were really slow to embrace science and research. We don't want to close this gap of I learned from this long storied tradition going back to Brahms, who, by the way, was a full human being. He loved poetry. He took his pupils on walks into the Black Forest for picnics to talk about poetry together because he wanted to connect and learn about each of his people as people. Otherwise, how are they going to be good musicians? Claudio Rao is another favorite of mine. His teacher insisted that he go to the opera, that he go to the symphonies, that he go to museums, that he read history, and that he knows something of science. Otherwise, how is he going to be a good pianist? And I mean, you can hear it in these storied performers. They are full human beings. They have a full life rich with experiences. They are not some hot house plant in one conservatory with their one teacher, and they do their undergrad, their grad, and their PhD all in one spot. When you know what I'm talking about, and they want to be a carbon copy of this person who can't actually disseminate his knowledge because he hasn't learned how the brain learns. And so there's a lot of hold on these traditions, holdover traditions that don't make sense, that involve touching your hand or touching the student's back, that don't make anatomical sense, that don't make scientific sense. Right. And I realize that that's offensive to some people. Like they don't want to change because they come from some wonderful tradition of music making. But I the science doesn't destroy that. It actually opens up how to disseminate it more accurately and more efficiently efficiently.

SPEAKER_02

And I'm so glad you brought up the third piece because I was just getting ready to, which is being a human, which is, and that's something that I focus so much on my teaching. And that's something that's it's more vibe and energy-based, and you can play with these things as developing, because face it, there's so many effective musicians who are not good musicians. But there's something but they're like, yeah, they don't know anything about music, can't read. Somehow their music just and it's that humanity piece. And I love that you brought that up. That's part of the process in conjunction. So let me do this because we're about out of time. And I want to make sure that people are listening. I think hopefully they've gotten a really good idea about this and feel really interested about it. But what's the first you're sitting in your studio, you're about to have your student come today, you just heard this podcast, you're like, oh great, and just turned everything I know on its head. What's the way to come into this? What's your first step to say you're a piano teacher and you're listening, you're like, you know what, I really want to. Is it just to go online and come to one of your courses, or is it to start hanging out in a group? What's the what's the thing?

SPEAKER_00

I for me, it's you know, come be my friend. Just come talk to me so that I can get to know who you are, what are you looking for, what are your what's your studio culture? What are you doing with these children and these adults? What are you trying to do? Because each person is different, each situation is different. But me aside, if you don't want to talk to me, which just hurts my feelings, I love what you're talking about.

SPEAKER_02

But you but you but you're saying you you find someone to talk to. Like reach out to people. Like it's literally cool to say, hey Ann, I heard your episode. Yes. I'm interested in this, and I don't know anything about it. So don't judge me for how I've been teaching my whole life.

SPEAKER_00

Be a friend. You need to have a friend. You can't be an island out there and think that you know you're gonna get better. You just you need to be in a community with people and you need real people feedback. Gotcha. The Facebook group, Music Moves for Piano, teachers. It's the name of the method with teachers at the end of it. Wonderful people, and a variety of people, by the way. There are folks in that group who use just a little bit of MLT, and then there are full-blown people like me who want to use it. Everything that I do. And I I tell folks, like, I think it's great to start small like that. Like we did a little bit of rhythmic movement, like in your piano lesson or whatever instrument that you're gonna teach later today. Do some movement. Do some. And I I don't care how hokey it is, you can teach a conducting pattern using a pencil as a baton, and then ask them to switch to the left hand and do it differently so that you gain both sides of the body. Have them Get up and sway to what they think is the pulse. And here's the kicker: don't correct them. Just observe. And then model where you know the pulse is, but be watching your student like, oh my gosh, like they don't feel the pulse, and I didn't know this till today. Um, and then you can do things like hold hands ring around the rosy style and gently sway with them to the pulse. I prefer, because there's a lot of science to back this up, not to touch, don't touch. Just model, and then you can comment at some point, maybe a few weeks from now, do you see how you move differently than I do? Mine's different. Or yours is different. Can you make it the same? Oh, that was almost the same. Okay, let's do something else. So you're always very gently having the brain teach itself that you're providing the correct model, but you're not telling the student, oh, you're wrong, try again. Okay, let's drill it for the whole lesson. No, these things take time. Myelination takes time. So make it a game, introduce some movement today would probably be a huge, huge step. And if you do movement already, then the step is make a variety of it. Don't do the same movements each lesson. The brain learns what something is by what it is not. So switch it up, float like a butterfly, ride on a cloud, swing in an elephant's trunk, give a butterfly a ride on the back of your hand. You have all these different imagery you can do to experience lightness and heaviness. Push against a car, like your car is stalled, you've got to push it off the road onto the shoulder. You're walking into a strong wind, or you've got mud in your shoes, or the mud is pulling your boots off, or something like that. Uh so we can experience this whole variety of human movement, and having it on a spectrum gives you that variety of technique at your instrument, too. You don't want all your staccato notes to be the same. You don't want um all your dynamic to be the same, like you've turned on a machine and this is the decibel, and that's what we're gonna do. You want to have an human experiences along a spectrum. So do that with movement too. Things will change in like three or four weeks. Movement and rhythm is one of those things where when you really embrace it, the results are scary. How fast the progress can be. Different with pitch, but rhythm is a really satisfying way in if you're new to MLT.

SPEAKER_02

Wow. Well, and this has been amazing. You've given so much beautiful information and advice and encouragement. So thank you for being here. We'll have to do it again.

SPEAKER_01

Uh oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Okay, we'll see how my MLT, my journey goes with this.

SPEAKER_00

I want to know about it. And I I don't know the guitar method yet. So, like, go open it up and then tell me like what does it look like? I want to know. I do.

SPEAKER_02

I'll fill you in. I'll fill you in. I've got this, I've got this great space to teach in. I've got I've got new students coming in, so I'm I'm ready to get in there. So I'll keep you posted. Thank you, Anne. This is awesome.

SPEAKER_01

Thank you.

SPEAKER_02

Bye-bye. You've been listening to the 440 podcast. If you found this helpful, subscribe at Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And leave a quick rating. It makes a big difference. To learn more about how to run your teaching studio with less stress and more joy, visit Fonds.com. I'm Eric Brander. Thanks for being here.