The Young Brain: Tone and Dynamics
By Julie Lyonn Lieberman, Artistic Director, Strings Without Boundaries.
Brought to you by the new Ascentè Violin Strings
Young students’ brains struggle to organize a relatively blank mental canvas to master and record a number of complex processes. Meanwhile, musical components like tone and dynamics often take a back seat to these core essentials.
Researchers define the brain’s ability to learn as limited to a specific number of units of attention. For instance, the conscious brain can only process 15 - 50 bits / second whereas the sensory system can process 11 million bits / second. That’s a ratio of 1 to 200,000 and explains why kinesthetically oriented tools that help maintain form in each hand are so successful.
Brain research also states that it takes three hours of repetition for the motor cortex to lock in a new movement pattern and two new patterns learned simultaneously can dilute this process and add minutes and even hours, weeks, or months to each undertaking.
Let’s look at our opening statement more closely in this context. Classroom learning encourages children to turn off sensory feedback and think in a left-brain, linear, sequential modality. During a music lesson, the child must switch cognitive processes in order to receive sufficient sensory feedback required to maintain correct form while simultaneously juggling tuning issues, sense memory, and the translation of symbols on a page into muscle moves. Even a straightforward task, like mastering a G major scale, demands right-brain thinking (mapping spatial relationships) and auditory memory (locking in the sound of the scale), as both motor cortices pump extremely different streams of information to the right and left hands. All this while trying to retain new rhythmic information. Most pedagogical systems, even before we understood the workings of the brain to the extent we now do, have wisely built skills in step-by-step single-focus routines to accommodate these complex processes.
Unfortunately, if tone and dynamics are left out of the early learning picture, they can tend to be ignored or added as peripheral and often mechanical skill later on. Those of you who’ve served as judges in your state juries know how we want to jump up and dance and break out the champagne when, after hearing a dozen-plus kids play the same scale, arpeggio and piece of music, one of them actually plays musically rather than just physically correctly.
Here are some fun approaches to tone and dynamics that won’t tax your student’s brains even further.
Photograph by Carey Weiss
Aside from the obvious — good form in the bow hand coupled with controlled bow motion across the strings—students have no preexisting criteria to compare or even understand the difference between a coarse or nasal sound versus a pleasing one. The shortage of decent-sounding fractional-sized instruments compounds this problem. And, as stated above, students are often too fixed on brain-to-muscle response and pitch to contend with such a complex issue.
There are several approaches you can use to help students focus on tone:
Use Gear. A microphone or a solid-body (electric) violin coupled with a mixer or preamp and an amp can come in handy to assist them. In all three cases, these components offer knobs that can control the amount of bass, mid-range, and treble that cooperatively generate the final tone coming through the amp. Nowadays, this equipment isn’t too expensive or can be bought used on Ebay. To learn more about these pieces of equipment, you can read "Get the Best Tone on Your Electric" on my NS Design blog “Lyonn’s Roar.” This issue includes an interview with D’Addario’s Fan Tao about how to choose strings. It can be a fun game for your students since they live in a world of technology. Invite volunteers to adjust the knobs and turn this exercise into a guessing game: Did Talitha boost the treble or the bass? How much does Sam need to turn up the midrange—2:00? 5:00? 9:45?—before it sounds too bright? What adjectives would the class use to describe the different sounds they hear?
Use Recordings. If you don’t have a budget to buy this equipment, try compiling snippets from various recordings of the same piece of music and invite them to describe the difference in tone between five cellists, violists, or violinists. Or play the same piece of music (preferably one they are presently learning) on several different instruments and ask them to describe the difference between the instruments.
Use Strings. Of course, the right set of strings can elevate a substandard instrument considerably. If your program can’t afford full sets of strings to use for ear training, try buying A strings from three or four different companies so that students can hear the difference on the same instrument. You might throw an old, dead string into the mix. This exercise provides an opportunity to teach them adjectives like shrill, nasal, bright, dark—or whatever other words you would like them to link to sound production—but you can also elicit descriptive words that include colors, feelings, and any other categories you can think of in addition.
We rely on markings on a page to convey the complex range of emotions a more advanced artist is able to incorporate into his or her performance. The range from pianissimo to double forte all too often doesn’t translate into expressive performance, so many string players never make that leap as they mature. Their dynamics sound correct but slightly mechanical.
I began to incorporate the use of imagery in the early 1980s while working on my book, You Are Your Instrument, to help alter mind-to-muscle response as a tool for dealing with unwanted side-effects from the chemistry of nervousness. I was delighted to discover a surprise benefit: greater expressiveness on the part of workshop participants in sessions nationwide. Images can be restricted to the five senses or extend beyond. As a warm-up, challenge students to play a simple phrase or open strings while seeing a specific color in their mind’s eye, smelling a particular scent, pretending they are standing in a pool of cold or hot water, walking in the rain, or any other range of images you care to experiment with.
Then you can experiment with images for either hand:
Imagine your right hand is a piece of flexible rubber
Pretend your left-hand fingers are bouncing on a trampoline
Envision standing barefoot in warm mud while the hair on your head reaches straight up to touch the sky
And so on. Once your students are warmed up, you can invite them to play a piece of music with images embedded into certain phrases. For instance:
Make measure 2 sound like a flock of birds taking off in flight
Start measure 4 as if it’s a train that’s coming around the bend and as you approach the end of the measure, the train will arrive and then head off into the distance
Make the final four measures sound like you can’t wait to get to the playground, etc.
Invite your students to invent images they think appropriate to certain phrases in whatever songs you’re currently rehearsing. You can also invite a number of volunteers to play the piece solo while focused on an image of his or her choosing and see if the class can guess correctly. For instance, a student might choose to focus on tasting lemon while playing, and, based on the experiments I’ve run, you’ll be delighted to find that many students will guess “tart,” “tangy,” “lime,” and other taste sensations that are very close to lemon.
Have you tried any of these techniques? Let us know! Stay in touch through Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. We love to see teachers and students achieving their goals.
