Klarinet Archive - Posting 000298.txt from 2003/07

From: "Lelia Loban" <lelialoban@-----.net>
Subj: [kl] Ignorance and competence
Date: Wed, 9 Jul 2003 16:03:49 -0400

Deidre Calarco wrote,
>>Sometimes judging yourself too harshly can ruin your
>>motivation, though. Anyone have ideas on how to judge
>>one's own performance in a constructive way?

Oddly enough, deliberately judging one's own performance in a perversely
unconstructive way can put matters into perspective: a twist on what Tony
Pay described in the thread titled [kl] Truth and the Philosophy of Music.
He described how, when he had trouble learning how to play the Weber
clarinet quintet on a 9-key, period instrument, he experimented with a
computer program called ELIZA, designed to behave as a good listener.

>ELIZA, originally written by Joseph Weizenbaum, mimicked a
>Rogerian therapist. Using canned responses, it would reflect back
>bits of what you thought were your problems, which it had invited
>you to type in.
[snip]
>Funnily enough, it was a help.

When I was a freshman in college at U. C. Berserkeley in 1967, a psych prof
showed my Psych 1 class a program called PARRY, which someone developed
from ELIZA. I don't remember who wrote PARRY, but instead of behaving like
a Rogerian therapist, the program behaved like a paranoid schizophrenic.
It worked basically the same way as ELIZA, with the program picking up key
words from the querent and feeding them back, but PARRY also had a random
phrase generator to throw in off-the-wall accusations, complaints and so
forth. The purpose of the program was to teach students how to keep a
dialogue going with schizophrenic patients who can't / won't cooperate in
the therapeutic process. Students were supposed to take the role of the
therapist asking questions of the "patient," PARRY, but when we got the
chance to goof around with the program outside of class, it was loads more
interesting to cast PARRY into the therapist's role. Here's how the "I
can't play the Weber quintet" conversation might go with PARRY:

?: I can't play the Weber clarinet quintet.

PARRY: What does the Weber clarinet quintet have to do with me?

?: Nothing. I'm just trying to play it better.

PARRY: Nothing? Then why are you trying to get me mixed up in it?

?: Do you know anything about the Weber clarinet quintet?

PARRY: Why do you want to know what I know about the Weber clarinet
quintet? I didn't do anything wrong. I'm not talking to you any more
without my lawyer.

?: Can you help me play this quintet better?

PARRY: Why should I help you play this quintet better?

Etc.. Neither of those computer programs really imitates a genuine second
personality, so much as they split the student's own personality. A
mentally ill person who's a dissociative hysteric splits unconsciously,
uncontrollably, and so completely that Personality A might not even know
that Personality B exists, and vice-versa, but in ELIZA and PARRY, the
student splits the way we do when we play chess against ourselves:
deliberately and not completely, so that each half knows what the other
half is doing. In ELIZA, it's a comforting kind of split, because the
"other" acts helpful and friendly, and just encourages the querent to keep
on mulling over the subject matter in a non-threatening environment.

I can see that the ELIZA type of split would be particularly useful for
someone in the situation Tony Pay described. When he first began the
challenge of learning to play the Weber quintet on a 9-key, period
instrument, he was already a successful clarinetist who knew a lot,
practiced a lot, had access to many helpful, knowledgable musicians as
colleagues, and generally had many good reasons to believe that he *would*
succeed in learning that quintet on a 9-key clarinet. By then, he'd also
had enough experience with learning plateaus to know that they're a normal
part of the process of consolidating a memory, and that a distraction or a
fresh way of thinking would do him good right then. He knew that he was
experiencing a temporary frustration that he could overcome. Maybe the
most useful part of that process was the beginning of it:

>So I put the clarinet down, went over to the computer, fired up
>ELIZA....

Tony already knew how to practice effectively, but the ELIZA program made
an interesting new approach to re-booting the wetware.

With PARRY, though, the dark side of one's personality is the one that gets
projected. That's the side that throws up roadblocks to effective practice
and progress: Why should I practice now? What's in it for me? Who cares
what I sound like? Why should I work so hard to gratify somebody else's
expectations?

It's useful to be able to drag that negative personality out of the back of
one's mind, shove it out into the open, argue with it directly and confront
those paranoid questions as genuine problems, not just dark thoughts to
suppress. Why *should* anybody help me to play the quintet better? (Why
does it matter to my teacher?) Why do I care what anybody else knows? (Do
those people have a worrisome amount of power over me? Meanwhile, what do
I want to know for my own satisfaction?) It's a fruitful line of dialogue,
because it brings to the surface the negative thinking and the insecurity
that cause some of us to sabotage our own "best" efforts (or settle for
less than the *real* best), while the humor and game-playing inherent in
trying to turn the conversation in a more positive direction de-fang the
potential morbidness. And, like ELIZA, a PARRY session can help simply by
providing enough of a time-out for the wetware to re-boot.

I wouldn't recommend PARRY to anybody who's seriously depressed or
literally on the verge of quitting. As a college freshman, I tried this
technique to solve my problem with stage fright when performing music for
an audience. That was a mistake. The PARRY session only made me obsess
over stage fright even more, and in fact I did go on to quit music
cold-turkey that year. However, although I no longer have access to the
PARRY program, I've used the negative mind-split technique many times to
get myself unblocked as a writer, since deep down, I know (and know that I
know!) that for me, writer's block is always a temporary glitch.

Lelia Loban
E-mail: lelialoban@-----.net
Web site (original music scores as audio or print-out):
http://members.sibeliusmusic.com/LeliaLoban

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