26 September 2011

Summerzine

My friend Christine did something amazing recently. I remember seeing her at a party toward the beginning of the summer, and she said that she was feeling a bit of creative unrest; that she needed to make something. Well, she did. She and her friend Dwight made a magazine, and it launched last week.



It's called Seasonzine, which, as the name suggests, is all about seasons. Each quarter, the published issue celebrates the season that is coming to an end. The inaugural issue, Summerzine, launched on the last day of summer with a fantastic party in Williamsburg.

Fuck winter, long live summer.

Summer 2003

My favorite pair of pages.

There is a ton of eye candy and wonderful writing in Summerzine. Oh and hey, I have a piece in it too! It's called 154-61, and here it is, on the right --

154-61

You can buy your very own copy here; the hard copy is $9.80 (which comes with a free digital version), and the PDF is only $0.99. I would love to see Fallzine become a reality, so I already bought a few.

So, here's the thing. I don't write about super emotional things very much anymore, because it's hard to put my thoughts into words (I have mentioned this recently). But I tried, and I submitted my best attempt at what summers in New York do to me. Reading the rest of the issue at home made me feel like someone had hit a gong right next to my ear – the ways that the other contributors wrote about their summer experiences mirrored exactly what I've been feeling all along. It was so moving to read others' tales of the unbearable heat pushing them to their limits that I didn't know what to do with myself.



Seriously, buy a copy. You won't regret it. Buy one while you can still grab on to the edges of the heat: it'll be that much more __________.

21 September 2011

On Systems Thinking

My friends and colleagues Joanna and Amy just published this deck on Systems Thinking.
This is part 2 in a 5-part series where Amy and Joanna deconstruct The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook. The first one was on mental models and went out a couple of months ago (which happily blew up online and I also implore you to read). Both are fantastic at presenting incredibly complex information in an easy and fun to read way – you'll find stories, cats, charts, and even a cheat sheet for running your own systems workshop. Take a look; you'd be remiss if you didn't!

14 September 2011

On muscle memory and piano playing

I took a trip to visit my parents a few weeks ago, and they surprised me by having my upright piano tuned. Halfway through a 30-minute stretch of playing bits of assorted songs, I realized something: I was on autopilot. I was daydreaming, staring off into space, and playing Yann Tiersen.

Now, this isn't necessarily a strange thing, because I've been playing for a long time and don't always have to pay conscious attention to every single note. But usually when I play Tiersen's work, I at least have to be partially thinking about what bit of the song comes next. On my upright, I didn't at all.

The reason I had such a hard time with this was: I didn't learn his music on my upright. I learned it on my digital piano. Shouldn't any song come more easily to me on the piano on which it was learned? This seemed like some sort of bonkers anti-state-dependent memory at work. I mulled the topic of muscle memory around in my head for a while, and finally dug into Wikipedia a little today to help with some rough thinking:

Some thinking on music memory.

I realize that there is a lot of research already done around fine motor memory, the psychology of music performance, etc. But this is where my thinking-out-loud-for-fun brain took me.



As I said, my mind went to muscle memory first. At the base level, once someone has played the piano enough, they can play any piano. Quite literally "Like riding a bike." But something I recently read in Piano: The Making of a Steinway Concert Grand – that all pianos have their own personalities, tones, and feels – had me thinking about particulars. There's a reason why, even though I know how to ride a bike, I've always nearly broken my neck when attempting to ride bikes with bullhorn handlebars, yet felt like I could ride the ones with riser handlebars in my sleep. More than just muscle memory for the act of piano-playing, it was THIS piano (my upright) that I spent the most time with; THOSE keys, with their particular width, spacing and weight; THAT bench's distance from the ground and piano itself.

The other circle in that chart, state-dependent memory, represents that piano's environment. It's in the same place in my parents' house that it's always been in – off of the kitchen and under the Verona painting. Also, I'm much more used to the feel of the house I grew up in than I am in an apartment I've been renting for just 2 years (on top of that: my digital piano is in its 5th environment, or apartment, by this point).

So, muscle memory is how pianos can be played interchangeably. And the particulars of muscle memory with a side of state-dependent memory – that piano in that position of that house – is what made my playing the most fluid. Here's another way of looking at it:



I can play almost any instrument with a basic piano keyboard setup – from an accordion to a Schroder-style toy piano. But I'm not very good. I'm better with a proper piano – either acoustic or digital. By "proper," I mean all 88 keys that are weighted. Next comes any acoustic piano. As awesome as brands like Casio and KORG have gotten at simulating acoustic pianos with their digital versions (I have a Casio, and I love it), there is just no substitution for the feeling of hitting a key that subsequently makes a tiny hammer hit a string. And finally, my most familiar piano. This is why I think it doesn't matter at this point which piano I actually learned a song on: I'll always be better at it on that one upright.

For your supplementary fun:
Muscle memory (Wikipedia)
State-dependent learning (Wikipedia)
A page on sight-reading and memory (from The science & psychology of music performance)
My favorite Yann Tiersen-related video ever: Dave Thomas playing La Noyee on accordion
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