36  Tonal Working Memory

To copy notes from a recording, we need to remember them just long enough for us to find those notes on our instrument and then judge if we played them correctly. But just as we can only remember a handful of digits in a phone number, there is an upper limit to the number of tones we can remember.

Scientists test this ability in humans by playing a sequence of tones (like a melody), and after some time they’ll play another set of tones. Participants are then asked if the tones were the same. You might be surprised to learn that almost everybody can do this, but (unsurprisingly) trained musicians can do it better and with longer sequences. Our tonal working memory can hold somewhere between three to seven notes on average, so it’s important that we work in very small chunks—especially at the beginning.

But your tonal working memory can’t hold notes for very long after you hear them. Even worse, the memories are easily erased if you’re hearing more notes or other sounds. So when you’re in the beginning stage of copying a note you just heard, each of the wrong notes you play will make the memory fade faster. Because of this, we recommend that you:

36.1 Memory “Hacks”

Familiarization

Here’s the thing: when we learn by ear, we’re not listening to a recording for the first time. When scientists test participants using random notes they’ve never heard before, it’s no surprise they can’t reliably remember 10 of them on the first try. If someone gave you the same “test”, but the melody was just Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, you’d probably have no trouble recognizing if the whole thing was correct or not.

But it’s not the case that your tonal working memory has grown more capacity. Rather, there’s a benefit to having a long-term memory of the melody that serves as an anchor for your short-term tonal working memory. When you listen to a handful of notes you already know well, you’re refreshing the long-term memory and reactivating those neural pathways again. It’s almost like your short-term tonal working memory can use your long-term memory as its own copy of the recording that it can access more quickly.

So when you’re about to learn a solo or melody from a recording, it’s a good idea to give it a good listen first. Consider playing it on a loop for a while. Consider using Call & Response mode to stimulate your brain to create its own playback of the recording that you can “hear” during the quiet period. Once you feel like you have a solid memory of the notes you’re about to learn, you’ll notice that the chunk-by-chunk learning with the Transcription Playhead goes a little better than usual.

Singing

Your memory for notes and tones is connected to the same machinery that you use to sing (or hum, or whistle) notes. And if you sing the notes you hear, you have a much better chance that you’ll remember them for longer. The sooner you can incorporate singing (or humming, or whistling—whatever you feel comfortable with) into your practice, the better off you’ll be. After you stop playback of a note or two, sing them back immediately, and keep repeating them while you go looking for the notes on your instrument. Even if you don’t continue singing the notes, your memory of the note will be better than if you hadn’t sung them.

But what if you can’t sing?! Even though scientists have found that most people can repeat a note that they heard, there are still plenty of folks who can’t do this. It takes some practice to develop this skill, but what are you supposed to do in the meantime? If you’re really struggling, you should try to use the Freezer to hold a note steady while you look for the note on your instrument. It’s sort of like letting the computer do the singing for you—playing the note(s) continuously while you hunt for them on the instrument.