For Musicians, Hearing Isn’t Better Than Seeing or Feeling
“As it turns out, there is merit to the Chinese proverb ‘I hear, and I forget; I see, and I remember.”
Researchers at the University of Iowa have found that when it comes to memory, we are incapable of remembering things we have heard nearly as well as things we have seen. While research like this has long been confirming this premise, research presented by James Bigelo, a graduate student at the University of Iowa, and Amy Poremba, associate professor in the UI Department of Psychology and corresponding author on the paper, offer some very interesting data that could prove useful in demonstrating why practice techniques favored by musicians for centuries may actually help instrumentalists while putting singers at an interesting disadvantage.
“We tend to think that the parts of our brain wired for memory are integrated. But our findings indicate our brain may use separate pathways to process information. Even more, our study suggests the brain may process auditory information differently than visual and tactile information, and alternative strategies — such as increased mental repetition — may be needed when trying to improve memory,” says Poremba, associate professor in the UI Department of Psychology and corresponding author on the paper.
Over the years, I have sat through as many singing lessons, instrument lessons, speech and debate camps, sports practices, and public speaking coaching sessions as I could. Teaching and coaching activities always fall into at least one of these categories: tactile, visual, auditory. Some activities, like playing the piano is tactile and is taught visually and auditorily, by the teacher showing and telling the student what keys to press and how to hold their hands. The student can see their hands next to their teacher’s hands. In basketball, when a player is being put through dribbling drills, the coach comes over and shows the player how to move their body. The player can see how their dribbling visually compares to their teammates. Public speakers have it tougher, because they are working on something that is auditory, their speech. They are receiving corrections verbally as well, so don’t have an opportunity to see the correction visually reinforced (unless we get crazy with sound wave recording technology — and I have). This isn’t to say that inflection, timing, pronunciation, etc, can’t be demonstrated effectively. They just can’t easily be demonstrated in a tactile or visual way. Singers are pushing the heaviest boulder up the hill because they can’t even see their own instrument, The Voice. The singer sings for their teacher on an instrument they’ve never seen and then the teacher must resort to creative analogies to auditorily describe to the singer what they should internally feel. The teacher can demonstrate on their own instrument by singing, but still, the information the student is generally expected to glean is auditory and it can’t be demonstrated on the student’s own instrument, unlike literally every other instrument. A singer will always be reliant on remembering sound, their teacher’s as well as their own.
“As teachers, we want to assume students will remember everything we say. But if you really want something to be memorable you may need to include a visual or hands-on experience, in addition to auditory information,” says Amy Poremba, associate professor in the UI Department of Psychology and corresponding author on the paper.
The study also is the first to show that our ability to remember what we touch is roughly equal to our ability to remember what we see.
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Bigelow J, Poremba A (2014) Achilles’ Ear? Inferior Human Short-Term and Recognition Memory in the Auditory Modality. PLoS ONE 9(2): e89914. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0089914
