Micah Killion: The One Thing Artist-Level Musicians Do Differently in the Practice Room

Micah KILLION: [00:00:00] And what we see great musicians do is play something wrong or, you know, inaccurately or something. And rather than going through all of the toiling to turn that into a doable thing, they play it wrong and then they immediately change it into something they can do. So it goes from wrong to right and then right and then they add a little bit of difficulty and it stays right and right and right and beautiful and right.

Noa KAGEYAMA: So the other day I came across a video of me practicing as a kid that my, my dad must have captured this when I was maybe 12 or 13 or something. And it was horrifying to watch on multiple levels. I mean, not just because of, you know, the knee high socks and you know, the rugby shirt and so forth.

And not even because of how bad I sounded like that I could tolerate it was because of how horrendous my [00:01:00] approach to practicing was. If you want to even call it practicing.

I was just like repeating the same thing over and over and over, clearly not having figured anything out or solved anything meaningfully.

I couldn't watch it. Like, it just, it felt terrible to see. But I think, I mean, I did this for hours and like countless years. And I did get better. And I think we've all been guilty of this at some point or another in our studies. And maybe part of it is that we just rarely get to see advanced musicians or expert musicians practice. Like we see the finished product, which is always amazing, but how they get there is just a mystery to most of us.

So this makes this paper that you recently published with, with Bob Duke, particularly interesting because you took a closer look at what exactly true expert artist level performers actually do in the practice room. This is what I'd love to spend some time exploring with you today.

I'd love for you to, to share some of the key [00:02:00] things that you observed, that all of us, whether we're in the first few years of studying an instrument or whether we're in our conservatory studies, or whether we have years of professional experience, like what are some of the key things that we can take away from your findings.

Micah KILLION: Well first I think you should publish that video, I think, not only for the the tube socks, but you know, one of the things that I know, well, I, you interviewed Bob Duke, my mentor, a couple of that was, gosh, years ago now. But you know, one of the things that he and I have worked hard and we're both continuing to work hard to sort of dispel is some of the mystery and the mythology that surrounds practice.

And I'm, I'm just, 'cause I'm, hopefully you keep this in the show, but I just wanna thank you for what you've done for our community to help do this. To help sort of take some of the, just some of the confusion that exists around practice and to infuse it with, you know, what's known about skill development, how it [00:03:00] is that humans get better and there's actually a lot of science about how we get good at stuff.

But it, in the music world, we are, many of us in many of our learning environments are still sort of operating on mystery.

You know, young Noa is in the practice room doing a lot of things, just kind of hoping that tomorrow or next week, some of those things will pay off. But you know, there not, it's not a clear understanding of how or why any of that stuff leads to learning when, for people that age.

You know, First of all, I think it's important to mention that for the, the experts that we watched, it's a mystery to them too. I mean, we did another project. So with this particular project we, we did, we watched, um, a handful of some of the best trumpet players in the world practice.

And, later on we actually did another project where we interviewed them about those videos about a year had passed. So we wanted to put some time to, just to sort of, so that they had forgotten everything they did. [00:04:00] And, they're not totally sure what they're doing either. So I don't think it's bad to have a sort of respon the response that you've had of like, I don't know what I was doing.

I don't know what was going on. I think a lot of us have that same response. But, one of the things that we sort of get caught up in when we're helping people practice more effectively is we want to teach them how to do things. We want to teach them how to behave in the practice room. And what we are trying to get out in this paper is not necessarily the doing portion, but the thinking portion that really great musicians, or, I mean all of us, we're doing the things we do in the world in response to how we think.

So in this particular paper, yeah, we sort of went into extraordinary detail about what it was that these expert musicians were doing moment to moment. So, you know, sort of what portions of the music they were playing, if they modified a passage, what did they modify it to? How did they modify it? Did they play a smaller portion?

Did [00:05:00] they, did they slow? Did they reduce the tempo? Did they, um, sort of extract some of the phrase shape from an, from a trial? So we looked at all these doing things and the reason why we, we went into such detail about, you know, what they did moment to moment is we used those observable behaviors to infer, uh, thinking. Like what it was they were actually thinking in the practice room.

Because, you know, when we're, it's not a, a radical thing to think that practicing musicians think that they are the ones making the music in the practice room. 'cause they are. That is one of the roles, like they are the ones playing the trumpet. They're the ones singing the phrase, they're the ones playing the violin.

That role, uh, is important, but it's only one of the roles that I think, actually end up, you know, sort of making learning either, um, you know, accessible or not. And it's not necessarily the doing portion.

So there's the, there's the [00:06:00] doer, the, the person who's making the music. There is the, as the perceiver.

So there's a perceptual role in that. And in our, you know, in the music world, it's hearing and feeling. So we have a perception of the way that we think we sounded and the way that we perceived feeling.

And then we have an assessor. We have a, a, a, a part of us that is making sort of a judgment call about the quality of the sound and the feeling that we just experienced, particularly is it what we intended or not.

And, um, but it's the last role that Bob and I are really hoping to tease out here. And that's the decision maker.

The, the really, the great practices are essentially answering one really important question over and over and over in the practice room. And that's based on what just happened, what should I do next?

And you know, one of the things that you've talked about a lot in this podcast, and there's a lot of great research that looks [00:07:00] at practice behaviors, what, what are typically referred to as strategies. It's been a big part of practice research over the past couple of decades to look at, you know, how practicers slow things down. How they break difficult or bigger passages in a smaller passage, a segmenting or chunking, um, how they use the metronome, whether they sing through stuff, you know, these sort of what are typically referred to as strategies.

We actually don't think they're strategies. Those are, those are activities and, they are things that people do, but a strategy is actually, a procedure for accomplishing a goal. And those activities in and of themselves do not, they do not rise at a level of strategy. There are things people do, but it's the, the strategy of great practice is what we're trying to get to.

Like why is it that great musicians are doing what they do moment to moment? And it's that decision making process that we are, we're [00:08:00] trying to tease out.

Noa KAGEYAMA: There were a number of elements in the what, what you and Bob called the central, I might be getting it wrong -the central model for effective practice or central strategy for you tell you tell me what it is at some point.

Micah KILLION: The central strategy of, of music practice.

Noa KAGEYAMA: yeah. And I wonder if maybe it would be useful to, to just kind of lay out what those key elements of the strategy are and then maybe unpack some of those individual elements.

Because I think when we see the strategy it makes sense, but the actual doing of the strategy is sometimes easier said than done. Um, so I wonder if you could just kind of lay out for us, uh, just, you know, to catch everybody up to date on, on what is this strategy, um, and what does it look like?

Micah KILLION: Sure. It's maybe important to say first that, you know, practice is iterative. That what we're referring to is the strategy is essentially an, an iterative cycle of thinking and doing that leads to [00:09:00] improvement. I sort of cringe at the word repetition a little bit. I just moved to New Jersey from Texas where I, where I, you know, was working with Bob Duke for six years.

And the, the word, I learned a verb when I was there, um, that I, I've since been told that it comes from like the, the competitive marching band world. But they used this verb pretty commonly in band settings. They'll say, okay, here's what the, it'll be something like, oh, we're gonna get this. It's gonna be just fine.

We just need to rep it. And there's this sort of almost religious belief in the idea of just doing it again, will magically make it better. And that's not the case. You know, anyone who's practiced as much as you and I have in our lives knows that it's entirely possible to repeat something poorly over and over and over again and get it no better.

In fact, you know, I've, I've watched enough hours of, of sort of beginner student level practice, probably a lot like your video to see that lots of repetition may actually make improvement less [00:10:00] likely. There are repetitive features of great practice, but essentially really effective practice is iterative in that it changes slightly every time you do it.

So the strategy that we're, that we outline is really about, um, these different iterations of things as we look to progress through, uh, you know, difficult passages. So. We give a, there's a sort of first step and it goes to the end, but it's not as if that's the beginning of practice. It's like getting on a moving train.

This is a, a cycle that's constantly happening during practice. We're just sort of making it seem as if it's a discreet thing that's not. It's not really that cut and dry.

The first feature is that great practicers formulate a vivid intention or prediction for each trial. And what that means, and this sort of hits a little bit on Edwin Gordon's idea of audiation, but it's essentially how vivid is your idea of the thing that you're aiming for. You've had lots of talks with people about goals and what we know generally about human behavior is that if you have a really fuzzy [00:11:00] goal, your brain's gonna come up with a really fuzzy solution. But if you have a really clear idea of how you want something to sound and feel, uh. The activities, the behaviors, the thoughts that you're, that you generate to reach that goal are much more likely to get you where you're trying to get. So great musicians formulate a vivid intention. Um, they perform the trial, which, you know, hopefully that's pretty obvious, but, you know, there does need to be some kind of doing for optimal practice.

Um, they identified discrepancies quickly, and this is a place where I had to sort of get outta my music brain for a little bit because I think a lot of great musicians who practice would say, well, of course, of course we do. Of course, we, we recognize when we're, when we miss a note or when we, you know, when we frack something or play a B flat instead of a b natural.

But, one of the things that we sort of tried to tease out a [00:12:00] bit was how magical it is that great musicians can stop when they hear things that don't go the way they want them to. Because what that means is that the thing they're hearing doesn't align with how they intended to hear it, which means that they must have an idea of how they were intending for that to sound and feel.

So the idea of an error, even really subtle errors in great practice is, is kind of a, an incredible thing to, to, to dive into. So they identify discrepancies quickly, they pause to think. Um, and I think probably in your practice video, uh, is something that I've seen a lot in string players and guitar players are really, this is an interesting thing here, where they just sort of do a thing over and over and over again.

And sometimes like the last note of one attempt becomes the first note in the attempt. Like there's literally no time between one attempt and another attempt. Um. But what we find, at least in these trumpet players, and that's who I watch with trumpet players, is [00:13:00] they take time to think presumably about what just happened and plan what to do next.

Um, and then the sort of bulk of what we were looking at with great practicers is this sort of final step, which is that they strategically repeat passages to minimize prediction errors. And there are sort of three big ways that they do that. And the first is that they doable-ize, they, uh, they adjust the parameters and I'm, I'm reading this here, so I'm, I'm, it's off the paper.

So they adjust the parameters of each succeeding performance trial to render momentary challenges surmountable in the near term. Now, all we mean by that is that when great practices do something that goes wrong, what they don't do is that same thing again. They won't simply just try it again, or they might try it again once.

Um, but when they, when they play something that doesn't go the way they intended to, they immediately modify that so that it [00:14:00] becomes a doable portion of that, or a doable version of that. And that's why we, we use the term doable eyes because they essentially immediately turn an undoable passage, something that they can't currently play.

They want it, they can't currently play the way they want to. They immediately modify it into something they can. Um, and I'm wanna come back to that in a bit because that, that is the sort of, that's the thrust of the paper, is there, they maintain contextual elements to the extent that's possible. And by that all we mean is that what great musicians probably don't do very often, we didn't see a single instance of it in our, in our data, but I, my guess is it's very rare, they don't simply go back and work, like if they're struggling with something in a sort of a d major passage, they don't go work on the d major scale. Um, they don't decontextualize that individual passage any more than they have to in order to play it beautifully.

And then the [00:15:00] final step is they recontextualize strategically in ways that maintain a high percentage of successful trials. And all we mean there is that once they do doable-ize a passage and they make it something they can do beautifully and accurately, they don't just then plunk it into the entire piece.

They now that they've got something that they can play beautifully, they add difficulty in ways that maintain beautiful, accurate playing.

So those are the big features of it. And there are a few things in there I can dig into with a little more detail if, if that's appropriate.

Noa KAGEYAMA: Yeah, and I, I wanna spend a healthy amount of time on the doable portion and the contextualization parts of that, because that was one of the main things I wanted to, to expand on. Uh, but yeah, maybe, maybe it makes sense to kind of go through the elements, taking a little bit of time in, in each of them, um, because these are questions that often come up when I talk to other musicians or teachers.

And I'd love to get your take on some of these.

So, for instance, the first step of formulating a vivid intention or prediction for [00:16:00] each trial. Um, I mean, this resonates with something even in psychology that my advisor was fond of saying, which is that, um, you know, if you misdiagnose the problem, you're probably gonna misdiagnose the solution.

And so we spent a lot of time really digging into like problem definitions, like what is actually the problem here? Because a lot of times we, you know, our initial guess as to what the, the problem was, not actually what the problem was. And so we would look for solutions in the wrong places and kind of be chasing our tail in circles.

And what you said, reminded me of something I remember Leon Fleischer, the great pianist saying, which is, I had a coaching with him years ago when I was in this piano trio as, as a kid. And, and we were really struggling to describe to him what our goal character wise for a passage was.

Like, we had very, like generic terms, like cheerful or upbeat. And he was really looking for much more than that, to like really paint him a picture in words of what we were going for. And we just [00:17:00] couldn't, you know, we're like. 18 or 19 or something like that. And so at some point he just said, you know, if you can't describe in words like verbally articulate what you're going for, it's probably because your idea of it or your concept isn't very clear.

We had been playing our instruments since we were like two or three or five, like a long time we'd been at it. Yet still, we didn't seem to be able to conceive of what it is that we wanted from this particular passage.

One of the questions I've got recently was, you know, how do you help younger students have clear concepts of what they're going for, but even for, you know, older students or more advanced students, yeah i'm wondering if you have any thoughts or insights on how to help us with the, the conceiving part, at various stages of development perhaps.

Micah KILLION: Yeah. Well, okay. Yeah, that's what I was thinking I could do is sort of go through each, each step of this that we identified with some kind of suggestion as to how it should modify our practice. And this first [00:18:00] one is tricky because it is, it's very difficult to get to the bottom of what our students are actually envisioning.

As you and Bob talked about, there, there are different kinds of memory and we do have declarative memory, the kinds that are associated with language that we can actually put words to. But then we have procedural memories, which are memories for how to do things. And those are not always, or they're not always easy to describe.

It's why we can't really describe how we balance on a bike or how a trombone player can describe how they play a two octave chromatic scale. It's just like, how do you put words to that? So it can be difficult for teachers to get to the bottom of like, what are these students really thinking? Um, but we do know that, just like you said, that the, having a having that clear goal is clearly advantageous for learning.

I mean, one of the studies that came outta the Center for Music Learning, where I used to work with Bob, uh, was done by Lani Hamilton, and he talked about this, but just to, just to sort of review that, what she found was that, artist level musicians and high [00:19:00] school musicians all make what they would consider to be errors at about the same rate when they practice.

And that the big difference between those two groups of humans is what counts as an error. And for artist level musicians, you know, having an F sharp with just not the right direction counts as an error. But for a middle school or a high school student, it may just be like, I don't know. I played an up bow instead of a down bow.

Right. You know, like, okay. so one of the more compelling stories of how people get really great at stuff is the evolution of the clarity of, of what they're intending to do, both on a global scale, but also on a, on a micro scale, on a moment to moment scale. So, you know, it's pretty common in sort of masterclass settings and studio settings for teachers to encourage students to listen to music with more detail and more focus and more attention, because we want to get a global idea of how you want to sound on your instrument or your voice.

And that's lovely. But I think where there's a lot of [00:20:00] room to improve, both from the teaching and the sort of actual music practice perspectives is not necessarily can individuals imagine a really vivid way of how they wanna sound and feel, but are they. Every moment of their practice. And one of the, one of the biggest things that I've tried to help, especially my young students, I love working.

I have a couple of middle school students and a couple of high school students that I take on primarily so that I can workshop some of these things with younger learners. 'cause college students are, you know, they're, they're great. I love 'em. They're, but they're, they're, you know, almost fully formed humans with fully formed brains.

And so you can adjust their behaviors in all sorts of different ways you can shape their behaviors. But getting middle school students and high school students to think like this is a particular challenge and I love it. But, it's just to put an extra moment of thought before every trial, three to five seconds, just, I mean, essentially what we're trying to do is build a habit of, before you do something, [00:21:00] are you thinking really carefully about the way you want it to sound?

'Cause one of the things we're trying to do is not just build habits of behavior, but habits of thought. What we want our learners to do is to think in a way that is most likely to elicit great learning. So just even simply taking the opportunity every time between every trial, take two, three seconds and think, how do I really want this to sound?

Because what we want them to do is to practice conjuring that aural image. It's it that's the practice at that point. It's not the doing portion, it's not getting your motor system to execute things in different ways. You are practicing conjuring an image of the way you want it to sound and feel. So just building that into as a habit into your practice.

What we know is that great musicians do this so beautifully and so consistently that they don't even know they do it. It. This is one of the things that I, that the great musicians that I watch practice and I interview, they often don't have a great understanding of what they're doing, but we know they have a very [00:22:00] clear idea of what they're intending to sound like 'cause they end up sounding like that. You don't stumble into sounding as good as Billy Hunter does that the principal trumpet player in the Met. You don't just accidentally wake up and are that good. I guess my concrete advice is try to build in moments, just small moments before every single trial and think as clearly as you can, how do I really want this to sound and feel?

Noa KAGEYAMA: That feels like it connects really nicely to, you know, skipping over the actual doing step and the performing step to the identifying of discrepancies quickly element, which I think, if I remember correctly in your paper you said, I mean, that's sort of an indicator of there having been a clear concept in the first place because if there wasn't, they wouldn't necessarily have stopped, but immediately recognizing this discrepancy.

Which I imagine might also be easier said than done, um, for, for various reasons. Maybe you could just say more about the [00:23:00] sorts of things that you observed or that came to mind when you saw how quickly they stopped upon, um, recognizing something that in their minds was a deviation from what they wanted, or, or I guess you could call an error.

Micah KILLION: Yeah. One of the things that I, I'm always looking to do with learners across the ability level is across the ability spectrum, is to embrace the role of error. I think too many of us, are raised in musical environments where errors are thought to be things to eradicate, you know, and, uh, I mean, even my middle school band director who was amazing. Hugely influential in not only my life, but hundreds of other people's lives. I'm not even gonna name her because I, I'm about to say something that's not particularly flattering, but we would do these chair tests in middle school and essentially she would pick like a hard part of the music. And if you wanted to move up a chair in the band, you would play it in front of the [00:24:00] band and then the person in front of you would play it in front of the band and whoever made fewer errors would get the chair.

And I, I don't think that's, I mean, that's not really how a lot of things are done these days, but it's not far from my think a lot of things. And what young learners I think, tend to take from that is that the goal of practice is to make fewer mistakes. And, you know, it, it is important to say that the goal is the goals of performance and the goals of great practice are, are different.

It When we're performing in real time, what we're trying to do is sort of conjure all of our capacities to express and play accurately and beautifully in that moment. But great practice is a measure of change. It's, it can't be judged by how amazing you sound in one particular attempt. The sort of value of practice is better judged by the change that happens from attempt to attempt.

And the primary mechanism for that change happening is noticing an [00:25:00] error or perceiving an error. And the way that I say it to some students is that really great error, should be slightly surprising and slightly dissatisfying. That if you are expecting an error to happen, then you're already choosing a task that's too difficult.

Like you're you, if that's not really gonna be hugely beneficial for your, your sort of your learning. Um, so it should be slightly surprising. It should be something that you didn't necessarily expect and then it should only be slightly dissatisfying. it shouldn't be, you know, catastrophic.

Like I remember practicing in dance studios at Julliard in my undergrad and having difficulty with a thing over and over and over again and it got so crushing that I was like, you know, weeping and shaking with frustration and I just had no one to help me understand that that's not how any of this should work.

Because what ends up happening to any learner that's [00:26:00] experiencing that is their brain is pairing, it's associating all of that practice with all of that negative emotion. And I have spent the better part of 20 years trying to, trying to unpair those things. But errors should arise in practice. I think one of the, one of the questions I get from students a lot is how much error.

And, it's a difficult thing to quantify, not only because music is an incredibly complex task and figuring out what's a discreet error is kind of a fool's game at this point. I don't, that's, maybe there'll be AI, you know, revelations in the next few years, but for right now, that's a, that's a complex problem.

But one of the things that I, I want my students to try to do is to manage the amount of error that comes down for however it is that they're perceiving and conceptualizing error. That what many, many of my students that aren't artist level [00:27:00] musicians, they are doing things that are far too error full.

It's essentially like error triage, that there's so many things going wrong, it's really hard to know what to do about it. Um, so one of the most effective ways to begin to design your practice so that you can get the most out of it is to essentially design things that o where only a little bit of it goes wrong.

And here I like to mention a couple of studies outside of the music world. There's one by Liman and colleagues that I can share with you, but they had a big old data set from the video game world and they found that motor acuity essentially how well we change our motor behaviors over time, Motor acuity seemed to improve the fastest when people had an error rate of about 15% and they, you know, which sort of aligns with what I think a lot of us intuitively feel when we do things that if we're doing things and a hundred percent of it's going wrong.

We're probably not getting better very quickly. And if we're [00:28:00] doing things in a hundred percent, if it's right, we're also probably not getting better very quickly. But if we're doing stuff that mostly goes just as we think it should, as we expect it to, then what it allows us to do is pay really close attention to the little bit that's not, and, um, that attention and our ability to address that small bit of error is sort of a magical power in, in our ability to change what we do the next time we try the thing.

Noa KAGEYAMA: I think there are two aspects of that that are really fascinating to me. One, and they're kind of on two sides of, of a continuum, maybe part of it is the, uh, you know, I think some have called it the zone proximal development, like making errors that are just slightly outside of what we're capable of at that moment and making sure it's not, like you said, a dozen different things are going wrong and we don't even know what to, to make of it all.

The other part of it being too though, and this looking back at the different steps of, um, [00:29:00] your change model that I'm liking more as I look at it, is I don't think that you mentioned the word error in it. Uh, you know that step three, it's, it's identified discrepancies quickly, right?

So discrepancies is, it's simply a mismatch between what your goal or expectations were and what ended up happening, and then I say this because I don't think it's just semantics, but I think our concept of what an error is, like you mentioned in the previous study with your colleague, um, at, at Texas.

I think when we're younger, our concept of what an error is is very limited and small relative to what an error could be conceptualized as. And, and I think often it's just, you know, did we play it in time, the right notes, with a good sound in tune and, and this sort of aiming for not making an error but defined only by those like three or four [00:30:00] factors leads to a, a very unsatisfying performance experience, but also a very unsatisfying listening and non-comp compelling listening experience for the audience.

And if that's it, we could spend a lot, I mean, I spent decades where that was essentially my entire aim and only, you know, as I got older realized that there's a whole other world much more meaningful that I just wasn't spending very much time focused on, which then limited the flexibility and development of the motor skills that were necessary to actually be able to play in that more compelling way.

Which, which is sort of my way of, of going into this aspect of the doable that was a core part of, of the paper. And I wonder if you could, first off, just kind of remind everyone listening like what does it mean to doable-ize as a passage? And then I wanna dig into like what that actually looks like and, and how to [00:31:00] avoid decontextualizing it too much 'cause the other word that came up a lot was the word context. And I wanna make sure that we really understand what that means and what that looks like.

Micah KILLION: Yes. So doable-izing is essentially, um, the immediate modification of a problematic passage into something that is playable. And by playable I mean we're sort of, we're, we are a little squishy with this language because what counts as an accurate, beautiful trial is gonna depend why wildly on where you are in the skill spectrum.

I mean, there's all sorts of individual variables that are gonna sort of modulate how you are thinking about this in your practice. well, first, let me say why we expected to find this. You know, we, we looked for it, but we, we expected to find this primarily based on some, some research that Bob Duke and Amy Simmons did.

Hmm, I think 2009. Um, where they watched, they gave a, a bunch of pianists, some really hard [00:32:00] music, and they recorded their practice and then they had them perform at the end of that, at the end of those practice sessions. And what they found were that, um, the best pianists, the people that learned the most.

In this study didn't just play the most notes, they didn't have the highest number of performance trials, which in our world is just an attempt. So it wasn't the, the number of things that somebody did in a practice session or practice sessions that determined the amount of learning. It was the number of accurate beautiful trials, the percentage of accurate, beautiful trials.

So what they found was that the people who learned the most did the most beautiful, accurate stuff. In other words, they made that their habit. And so this all comes back to habit formation. That when, when I watch young learners practice, sometimes they'll do something that elicits a lot of error. So there's like, you know, not good sounds, rhythm's weird. They frack a couple notes, they're clearly not comfortable with [00:33:00] it.

What young learners will tend to do is play that, and I'm gonna use the term. I'm gonna just say, wrong and right here, but I, I don't mean that. Like they played what was on the page. I mean, they played what they intended to play. Um, so they do it sort of wrong and they know they missed a lot of stuff and then they'll do it wrong again.

And they'll maybe repeat that again. And then maybe then they'll start to play a smaller bit and they'll make it a little bit smaller. Or they'll take the tempo down just a little bit. It's still wrong. And then they sort of try another thing and then it's still wrong, wrong, wrong, until they get to a doable version of that.

And then they play it beautifully and accurately. And, um, so in that scenario, what they end up doing is playing about, you know, 10 to 15 inaccurate sort of not beautiful trials. And that is a, that's a, that plays a, a huge role in their habit formation because that is now their habit to play that badly.

And what we see great musicians do is play something wrong [00:34:00] or, you know, inaccurately or something. And rather than going through all of the toiling to turn that into a doable thing, they play it wrong and then they immediately change it into something they can do. So it goes from wrong to right and then right and then they add a little bit of difficulty and it stays right and right and right and beautiful and right. And they'll have small deviations from that. But, that sort of format of, of the sort of beautiful, accurate trials versus inaccurate, you know, sort of not expressive, not not good trials. That's what we would expect for people that are really good at music is they are really good at making it their habit to play things beautifully and accurately.

So one of the things that I think students struggle with is the immediacy of the doable. That it, it will take them many moments and many trials to get to a doable version. So one of the suggestions I'll make to my students is to doable-ize it m more than [00:35:00] they think they should. And this is sort of the realm where, where the strategy use comes in.

That like they're not always sure what to do, how to make it doable. Do they slow it down, should they play a smaller passage? And, uh, these are all great questions, but, my take on it is that the, the method of doable-izing is less important than the amount of doable-izing. So whether you slow down or play a smaller passage is not, it's dependent on the, on the, the, what you're actually struggling with.

The important thing that I want my younger students, especially to get better at is doable-izing enough. Go back far enough in your learning sequence so that you're starting from a place of strength, reliability, consistency, beauty, expression, and then build from there. And that can be, that can be very, very hard.

I mean, the decision, well, that gets to the decision making process that we'll talk about in a little bit. But, so the, the thing that I would suggest, if you're [00:36:00] looking to sort of maximize your ability to, to form better habits, and, you know, not just practice habits, but performance habits, habits of behavior is to when you perceive a discrepancy between the way you intended to play and the way you actually played, think about that for a second, and then really try to make the next thing you play the next thing. I don't mean like a minute later, five minutes later, I mean, the next thing you play aim to make that something that you can play beautifully, accurately, and expressively. And this for younger learners and people that are, are still sort of early in skill development is going to feel very, very hard.

Very few of the people that I work with at sort of college level and younger, uh, can do this well. It always feels like, uh, they're doing something too small. They're doing, they're, they're doing it too slowly. It feels like not enough a not a [00:37:00] difficult enough task. It's the feedback I get from students.

But what I try to help them understand a little better is that in order to play this entire movement of a sonata beautifully, you've gotta play these two notes beautifully. Those two notes aren't gonna magically get more beautiful if you haven't given them the focused attention they need. So if you play a phrase, and most of it doesn't go the way you want it to, play two notes, get those two notes really, really beautiful, it'll take a moment or two and then start adding some notes, add some tempo, add, shape, add, you know, a metronome, whatever it is, however it is that you're adding complexity.

Do it in a way that starts from a place of strength, reliability, consistency.

Noa KAGEYAMA: I was gonna say, yeah, I imagine it's not so easy to know how to make something doable. 'cause a couple things. I mean, one, I I saw you catch yourself that it wasn't the number of correct repetitions, right, the percentage, which I think is an important distinction that we have to remember. Like, [00:38:00] we're trying to increase the ratio of this beautiful, you know, correct, if you will, repetitions relative to the, the, the, the, the discrepancy ones.

In your experience, has it been largely a matter of experience and just learning how to calibrate or knowing yourself better and knowing what's difficult for you, knowing what you're capable of? I mean, is that a big part of it?

Like, does that even take practice perhaps to, to get better at knowing how far back to take it to doable-ize?.

Micah KILLION: Yeah. I mean, what we see in the, in the experts is that they sort of do this amazing thing where they don't doable-ize it any further than they need to. It's not like they go back to playing long tones or just sort of work on their bow hand because that would be a waste of time. These are incredibly busy humans that only have 45 minutes or an hour a day to learn the music that they gotta play.

So the way that they've optimized that is they sort of have this really sweet spot that they hit where they don't doable-ize any more than they need to, but it's just enough so that they're not making a lot of errors. [00:39:00] And yeah, that is absolutely a skill to be learned. I mean, prac, that's the, the thing that I'm so thankful for you for is that we can start thinking and talking as musicians about practice as a skill.

You know, it's not just that we're improving our performance, we're improving our practice, we're changing the trajectory of our learning by doing things like this. So, yeah, that it's a, it's a really, there's a, I think there's a, um, there's a lot for musicians at every ability level to think about here.

One of the key factors in this is that practice should be, uh, primarily characterized by curiosity. You know, it's data collection. It is one of the reasons why we, why we referred to mistakes and errors, uh, why we sort of left those off of the end framework that we call them discrepancies.

Because I think there is a lot of baggage, there's a lot of weight that we assign to errors and mistakes, and we have a lot of guilt and shame and that from a behavioral perspective, um, it [00:40:00] is, it's just a discrepancy. And when something comes up, you go, huh. I'll tell a quick Bob story because he's Bob, Bob Duke.

I had the great pleasure of doing some eye tracking research with him and in the lab down there when I was doing a PhD, and we had these really cool glasses with really amazing software. But doing these two things together brought up a lot of error. So we had these huge data sets of like where people were looking in the world and for how long?

And there was a time where there were, there were three PhD students. There were really big, big brains, right? Lorelei Batislaong, Laura Hicken, and Robin Heinsen. Three of my absolute heroes, um, that I was working with at UT and then Bob, and we were going through these data sets and we were just getting error after error after error.

Nobody could figure out where this was coming from. And this is about a couple hours went by and every time we tried something and it didn't work, I got more frustrated, like my blood pressure [00:41:00] went up a little bit and like I turned a little redder and was like a little more angry. But Bob had a different response.

Every time something went wrong that didn't go the way we we wanted it to, there was no solution. Every time that happened, Bob just goes, huh, I wonder what would happen if we tried this. And and I got, I got, I got peeved at him. 'cause I was like, it made me even angrier that he was so calm and collected during this whole thing.

But, you know, I, I went home and like had to, you know, decompress a little bit. And then it just occurred to me that like, oh, that's how really smart people think. That's like, that's the way they approach errors. It's like, that happened, okay, now we're like one step closer to getting the thing we want. But, um, yeah, I think when, when we're hoping as, as musicians ourselves or teaching students to do this, there is not a right way to teach them how to doable-ize.

But we need to have an exploration of like, I mean essentially I'll talk you through what I do with one of my middle school [00:42:00] students who he, he can do this on his own at this point where he'll play something and all I have to say is, how did that go? And he'd say, uh, didn't, I didn't really, that F wasn't kind of what I wanted.

And I was like, okay, well what's your move now? And he'll say, well lemme try this part here 'cause I know I can do that. And I was like, great, how many times are you gonna play that? He goes, uh, a a few, a few. Well, let me get it how I want it to a few times in a row. And then, so he'll do that for a few times in a row and I'll go, okay, great.

That sounds really lovely. What are you gonna add to that next? That's, you know, sort of gonna get you to where you want to go. And I'll say, I, lemme try adding this D and the EI was like, great, try that. And it's just essentially like we're toiling, you know, as long as we start from a place where he can make music beautifully, then we sort of begin to have experiences that allow him to connect what he's doing and the decision he's making with the relative success of that decision.

And that's what a great, that's what the best practicers I know that's what they do. They have that decision making process. [00:43:00] So, um, it's so present in every moment of their practice and it's, I undeniably responsible for their artistry and their expertise.

Noa KAGEYAMA: I love the way that you framed that and, and you've probably been saying this all along and I'm just now kind of hearing it this way, but, but it, this, this description of an additive process where we're like adding tiny challenges that we're curious to see, can we do this and can we enhance this passage in this way that feels much more satisfying and funner than the, let me keep playing this until it doesn't suck anymore.

Kind of, kind of framework that I observed in myself back then and you know, like constantly hearing something that we're not happy with and waiting for it to suddenly, magically somehow sound better or not displeasing, but I mean that just sounds like so much more engaging and fun than, um, yeah, I think how we naturally gravitate towards,

Micah KILLION: [00:44:00] Well, I, I, so I'm from Florida originally, sorry to interrupt, but I'm from Florida and we had to learn to swim when we were really young because it's Florida there. I mean, it's central Florida. There's sort of lakes everywhere. So you, we took swimming lessons when I was like four or five. And I remember, um, the swimming teacher in the pool, she, and I was, she was right next to the edge and I would sort of hop in and then she would say, swim to me and she would only be a few feet away from me and then I'd swim back to the edge and she would keep swimming backwards as we would do this.

And I remember knowing that. I was like, look, I see you. You're swimming back. It's just stay where you are. Let me do that thing. But you know, that's essentially what we are trying to do for our own faculties is we're trying to essentially, you know, I talk about it as like we enter the practice room with this sort of blob of stuff that we can do really well.

And that blob is always sort of jostling a little bit and changes from moment to moment and day to day. But our job in any practice session is to take that blob and sort of do some stuff with it so that at the end of that practice session we can do that. And just a sliver more. If that can be [00:45:00] every practice session of your life where you take that stuff and just expand it a little bit.

One little thing, one, a couple of notes, one thing, and that ends up having the, the capacity over decades of practice to have huge downstream effects in your ability to express yourself in your instrument beautifully and accurately.

Noa KAGEYAMA: The other thing that I wanted to just kind of make a note of, um, is, you know, if this episode, I'm not encouraging this, but if this episode were a drinking game and you know, you, you took a sip every time you said the word beautiful or beautifully. I didn't count, but it's a number of occurrences. And, and I just wanted to highlight that because that is something I, you know, I remember Bob talking about that always often as well.

And then this goes back to this idea of, of defining error. I think he even said in, in his episode something about how, um, you know, a note without inflection is, is a wrong note essentially. And that's something that I think when we're younger, we don't really think in [00:46:00] those terms because we're just again, focused on the kind of bare basics of, correct note, pitch time, et cetera.

Um, and, your story of, of curiosity and so forth also kind of reminded me of a mentor of mine, and his name is Neal Newman. His whole philosophy that he kind of tried to convey to us was for us to approach life itself more as an experiment and less as a test or exam. And, you know, he really conveyed that to his, his athletes as well.

But, uh, that's what this sounds like and, and feels like to me when you describe it. So I'm trying to tie multiple things together, I suppose here to dive further into the doable-izing. Um, but it, I'm also reminded again of something Fleischer said, which is, that it's easy to play a note. It's much harder to play that note expressively. And along with the word beautiful, a little bit ago you used the word, you know, to define [00:47:00] expectations for phrase. You know, beautiful and expressive, and I wonder if you can say more about the importance of that part of it and the learning process, and also maybe, especially as it relates to the, um, the doable-izing process and, and making sure to include that as part of it and why that's so important.

Micah KILLION: You know, I'm, I was talking to someone the other day about. Well, actually with some friends of mine, we were presenting, uh, down in Florida to some, uh, some the music education conference down there. And one of the things that we, that Bob really does a good job of, of getting us to think hard about is, uh, the important of expressivity.

And one of the ways that we can think about it is that, you know, we, when we practice or we teach, we have all these what seem like discreet goals for ourselves or our students. And we want them to play with good tone and good time, and we want them to be in the right [00:48:00] key signature, and we want them to have the dynamics.

And we have all these things that seem like discreet units. And in some ways, you know, like beginner method books do us all a disservice because they try to sequence things in ways that make it possible for us to build on what we knew last week. You know, like, now you're ready to play a and they're like, here's the fingerprint.

A and then everybody in the band plays an a. Um, but it, when they sort of begin to introduce musical elements bit by bit, I think what it ends up, I, I don't know, the, the sort of picture that a lot of young learners I think end up with is this sort of Mr. Potato head version of how music's supposed to go.

That music really makes sense when you have like the right lips and the right nose and the right eyebrows and the ears. And so they just sort of put all these different pieces together and hope that it is the thing that the teacher would refer to as music. Um, but what we know to be true is that if, if the goal is playing with expressive inflection, [00:49:00] every bit of discreet music making is included in that.

You've gotta play with good time, you have to play with good tone, you have to play in tune with the people around you, you it. And so when, when we sort of break things down into, into these discreet units, I think some of the wholeness gets lost.

Like one of the ways, one, uh, I might get too off topic here, and if you need to edit this out, please do.

But, um, I think in, in the brass worlds where I'm a trumpet player, uh, I teach at Montclair State University, but in, I think brass players fetishize fundamentals more than any other group of musicians. I think I, I, if someone disagrees with me, I would love to hear it, but, you know, we, we sort of, we'll do mouthpiece buzzing for hours a day.

We'll do breathing bags and these sort of breathing exercises. And, um, if I'm, if I'm talking to a student about this, I, here's what I'll do. I, [00:50:00] well, I dunno if you can see this. I'll try to do this thing and I'll talk about it. Um, I'll sort of back away and I'll, I'll swing my leg back and forth, you know, I'll making a kicking motion and I'll do that a few times over and over again.

And then I'll ask the person I'm working with, I'll say, did I just get better at soccer? And if so, why? If not, why not? And usually with a a, a small discussion, I can get them to admit that I probably didn't get better at soccer. Although kicking is a fundamental part of playing soccer. Well, just simply swinging your leg back and forth probably isn't getting you better at soccer because there's not a ball.

And importantly, there's not the perceptual feedback of where the ball goes when you're doing that swinging of the leg thing. And if you really wanted to make it useful, you might even have a human that you're trying to kick the ball to maybe a goal and maybe even a, a defense person. The big takeaway there is that the further away [00:51:00] you get from the actual task, the weirder it gets just to practice that one thing.

It just has it, the, the disconnect between the final goal and the thing you're actually working on is way too wide. Um. And I think a lot of us, when we, when we think about practicing, we're we're, we're decontextualizing in ways that don't actually serve the expressive inflection. So the, one of the things that we talk about in this paper a lot is, is how much context that great musicians keep, and particularly the expressive inflection that what we didn't see once in all of the, uh, that there were not thousands of trials in this study.

There were just hundreds, but there were hundreds of, of performance trials. We didn't see anybody do anything without expressive inflection. And to us in this particular study that suggests that that playing expressively and [00:52:00] beautifully is foundational to what artist musicians are doing in the practice room.

It is not the case that they get all these mechanics worked out and then they plunk art on top of that. That's not at all what they're doing. The way that they're formulating their behaviors and their thoughts is in response to an expressive intent that the skills that they develop are because of what, how they want the music to sound in its entirety, not with the right lips and the right nose and the right eyebrows.

It's the whole thing that they're responding to, and it's the whole thing that's guiding their moment to moment behaviors and iterations that allow them to change their motor behavior over time.

Noa KAGEYAMA: I don't know that you would have someone listening, you know, think this or argue this, but if, if someone were to hear that and say, well, you know, these are artist level performers who have earned the right to play musically. Um, like what would you say to them to kind of disabuse them of this idea that, that they [00:53:00] have been able to do this because they have gotten to the point where they can do that and, and that it's not something that beginners are, are capable of or allowed to, to explore at that stage.

Micah KILLION: yeah. I, I, I, I, I, hopefully nobody is thinking that, but if they are, I have some videos to show them of young people playing music expressively. Um, you know, I'm thinking of, of, um, there's a, a teacher outside of Austin, her name is, um, Jennifer Bergeron. She teaches at Walsh Middle School, and she teaches the way that I think Bob would teach middle school band.

That expression is first. And the, the, the sequence of lessons that emerged from that program are because of an expressive intent. And those kids make beautiful music. And more than that, uh, they enjoy it. And I think I've, I've been doing some work recently with one of my colleagues at at Baylor University.

I don't work at Baylor. He's at Baylor [00:54:00] Wiff Rudd is his name. He's a trumpet player that is a fantastic name, Wiff Rudd. Um, and we are, we are curious about how much joy is situated in our learning and in our teaching scenarios. Um, and, uh, one of the takeaways from our work right now is that joy is foundational to what we do.

And I think practicers at every level, students at every level deserve to enjoy what they're doing more. They deserve a healthier relationship. With skill development and, you know, learning to play music expressively beautifully with others is an incredibly rewarding and reinforcing activity. And if the highest bar you're setting for yourself or your young students is to play music correctly, you're essentially neutering them from one of the most important human experiences that [00:55:00] we can conjure to, to, to make beautiful things.

So I, I think there's, there's a, a sort of an unimaginable disservice done by, by allowing young people to think that music is just the, the, the real estate of the artists. You know, we toiled on in technique and mechanics land, and only once you've done that can you be at a conservatory where you are allowed to make beautiful things.

It's no, no, go watch young kids make music beautifully and watch their joy. And, um, there should be a lot more of that. And so, like putting expression first and leaving it sort of in the middle of practice at every stage of learning, I think benefits individuals, but more importantly, it benefits our community of musicians and artists and aspiring artists and researchers and teachers and everybody.

So I would, [00:56:00] I would respectfully, uh, ask that that person get some more data about how much kids enjoy playing music expressively, and let's, let's center into that.

Noa KAGEYAMA: I cannot imagine a better place to end the session, but do you have a minute? I mean, can I go beyond a little bit?

Micah KILLION: Yeah, please.

Noa KAGEYAMA: So I'm gonna risk that perfect ending by, uh, by asking just one last question that, that I I didn't add earlier. And that's about consistency, you know, so once you've gotten to a point where, and you may already have kind of spoken to this in the process of this episode, but you know, once you've gotten to a point where you've, you've, you've doable-ized a passage, you've built it back up to add more of the context in, of, you know, the different elements of expression and challenge and difficulty to really get it to where you want it to be.

How do you then ensure that you're able to produce some version of that with some degree of consistency, especially in performance situations [00:57:00] where things may change or feel different? Like what does that process look like?

Micah KILLION: Well, one of the things that, especially my, my more advanced students, I, I try to get them to think a lot about is that the goal of great practice is to go all the way from, I can't play this the way I want to. And then we get to, I can play this the way I want to. But that's only half of it. The other half is from, I can play this the way I want to, to, that's the way I play it every single time I play.

And what I see a lot of, a lot of prac, a lot of young practicers doing is going from, I can't to, I can, and I, I'm sure there's some research about this, but I don't know why, this seems to be such a common thing in music practice, is that students will like sort of toil and it'll go sort bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, good, and then they'll do one that they really are happy with.

And I think it cues something in the brain that says like, oh, I got it. No, you don't. You don't. Got it. What you got in that [00:58:00] scenario was a whole bunch of wrongs and one right. For the artists musicians that we watched, they did not do this thing that we actually encourage young students to do.

And we, I have a reason why, why we think they don't. But for young students that, um, you know, sort of toil and modify and then they get something that does go the way they want it to, their first move, the first move should be to do it again. Make it happen again. Make it happen that beautiful twice in a row.

That it's not enough to just get it once. And I know I've, I've had some interesting discussion with improvisers and jazz musicians about this particular thing, and that's maybe a different talk, but for, for, I'm assuming that most of your listeners are from the, the sort of western classical tradition.

And the goal is that we want consistency. We want reproducibility in a, in a range. It's not as if, you've talked about this far more eloquently than I can, but what we're not [00:59:00] aiming to do is repeat movements over and over again. We're aiming to repeat outcomes, expressive outcomes. We want to under lots of different scenarios.

So after you sort of work on something and toil and get something great, do it again. And what almost everyone is gonna be shocked by is not only that, you're highly unlikely to be able to do it again immediately, that you'll see when you start paying attention to the percentages. Your success rate when you try that 20 times, how many of them are go really, really beautifully?

And, and what that ends up engendering is a really advantageous, um, attention to very small differences from trial to trial. And that that perception of discrepancies, to go back to that is what allows us not only to notice errors. But to do, do enough of healthy repetition, uh, repetition, iteration so that, so that [01:00:00] most of what you're doing is exactly the way you intend for it to be.

So all that to say, um, the concrete suggestion is when you play something beautifully, especially after having done a couple of trials where it's not gone the way you want it to aim to do it again. And really one of the things that well, Bob and I have talked a lot about is the idea of having clear observable goals.

This is a big part of his program done at UT, is that we help teachers and students, um, conceptualize clear, observable goals for the thing that you're aiming to do. And one of the ways that I try to do that with my students is to say, you know, you're, you'll know that you'll be done with this when you can play this five times in a row, beautifully, accurately, ex exactly as you intend to play. And that seems like a crazy number to them because they're like, you know, they'll do four and then the fifth one they sort of botch and it's like?

Nope, try again. Start again. But what we're trying to do is to make [01:01:00] the brain and the body essentially, you know, coordinate in ways that allow a consistent response to that.

Noa KAGEYAMA: And it's not like a punitive exercise. It's more, um, my impression of it is that they, they retain that curiosity

Micah KILLION: It's a reach.