# Why you should learn a musical instrument

I have liked music very much since I was a teenager. I spent many hours late at night in Soulseek chat rooms talking about and sharing music with my online friends. So, I tend to just have some music floating around in my head on any given day. But, I never learned to play any instrument, or use any digital audio software. It just didn't catch my interest.

My wife learned to play piano as a kid, so we happen to have a keyboard sitting around in our apartment. One day I was bored so I decided to just see whether I could figure out how to play some random song that I was thinking about right then. I found I was easily able to reconstitute a piano version of whatever melody I was thinking of, just by brute-forcing which notes were which, given a lot of patience. So that was satisfying enough that I wanted to keep doing it.

What I didn't know is how immediately thought-provoking it would be to learn even the most basic things about playing music. Maybe it's like learning to program, if you used a computer all the time but you never had one thought about how it might work.

Many of the things I learned immediately that surprised me were about my perception of the music I had listened to for all of my life. In my mind, my subjective experience of remembering music that I am very familiar with seems very vivid. I feel like I can imagine all the instruments and imagine all the sounds, just like they were in the song. But once I had to reconstruct the music myself, it quickly became clear that I was tricking myself in a variety of ways. For example, my memory of the main melody would be very clear. But my memory of any harmony or accompaniment was typically totally vague. I absolutely could not reconstruct something to play with my left hand on the piano, because I wasn't actually remembering it; I was just remembering something more abstract, I guess.

Sometimes I would be convinced I would remember a melody and reproduce it on the keyboard, but then I would listen to the real song and be surprised. The most common way I got surprised was that in my memory, I had adjusted it so that I could physically sing or hum it, even though I don't often sing. If there was a big jump up or down the scale, I would do something in my memory that sounded sort of OK instead, like replace it with a repeated note, or the same thing moved an octave, and then forget that it had ever been any other way.

I found that if I was remembering something that had fast playing, I often actually could not remember the specific notes in between beats, even though I felt that I could hear it in my head. No matter how hard I "focused" on my memory I couldn't get more detail. Actually, I found that there was some speed such that even listening to the music, I could no longer resolve the individual notes, no matter how hard I paid attention or how many times I replayed it.

There have been many more kinds of things I have learned since learning to play a little:

*   Since playing music on a keyboard is a complicated physical task involving complicated coordination, I learned a lot about what both of my hands are naturally good and bad at, and what sort of things they can coordinate easily or poorly.[^hs0npwu8c6u]
*   Learning the musical structure of songs that I know and trying to arrange them for piano showed me all kinds of self-similarity and patterns inside the songs that I had never had a clue about before. I could listen to a song hundreds of times and not realize, for example, that two parts of the song were the same phrase being played on two different instruments in a very slightly different way.
*   Often I will be trying to learn to play something using one "technique" for learning and practicing it, and having a hard time, and then I master it almost instantly by switching "techniques" (e.g. by switching what I am using my conscious attention for while I try to play it, or by concentrating on a more specific hard part, or by remembering some part of the musical structure I wasn't appreciating before) which is a vivid illustration of the power of different tools I have for using my mind.

I could easily go on for many pages. I think it's kind of silly that even though I have known many musicians, I don't think anybody really told me how many things I could learn by spending only a very modest amount of effort learning about music. So if you are like me, then that's my message to you.

[^hs0npwu8c6u]: While I was trying to figure out how to play with both hands, I learned a funny thing you can try. Sit down next to some objects. First, just think to yourself that you want to do one thing with your right hand, like take a sip of coffee, and another thing with your left hand, like pick up and turn on your phone. If you're like me, it's totally effortless and your hands do it with almost no conscious attention. Then, try again, but think that you want to do it but slowly. You can probably still do it with total ease and fluency, with no attention. Then try it while thinking anything involving two different speeds or timing, like "I want to slowly pick up and sip the coffee, and when I am in the middle of it, pick up and turn on my phone at a normal speed." If you are like me, your brain will basically panic and be unable to mind both timings without doing a lot of pausing and stuttering and redirecting most of your conscious attention to the task. It seems for me there is a kind of conserved "timer" resource in the brain that can only easily keep one timing at once. ↩︎