 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: mrn
Date: 2010-11-26 17:15
I came across this video the other day, and although it's not directly related to music, it made me appreciate the power and value of developing "muscle memory" through practice. These kids can perform amazing feats of calculation because they have arithmetic "in their fingers." Moreover, with sufficient practice, they don't even need the physical abacus any more, just as it's possible to practice the clarinet mentally without the instrument in hand.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIiDomlEjJw
I've tried playing around with a "virtual abacus" program myself for about the last week or so and found that it does seem to eliminate much of the need for conscious mental effort with arithmetic. Adding or subtracting numbers becomes much like playing a familiar scale or arpeggio: you simply "do it" without really "thinking" about it consciously.
I imagine that the faster you go, the less you rely on sensory feedback from the abacus because your brain starts to anticipate where the beads will be--thus, at some point there's little or no need for the abacus.
Anyway, I thought this was very interesting.
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Author: Ronish
Date: 2010-11-26 20:02
Wow! those kids are amazing. It is a bit like what I am finding is helping me the most at the moment for sight reading and playing faster or more accurately those fast passages in my music. That is lots of pages everyday of music exercises. Stuff like Wohlfaht`s exercises.
In our band with a piece I am finding difficult I can perhaps master it after an hour`s practice but come next week`s play and I`m back to having trouble. So I`m beginning to find now that it is better to put my time in playing page after page of these exercises and my mind then has more of an ability to read any combination of notes.
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Author: clarinetcase
Date: 2010-11-29 23:05
practice is all about building dendrites and developing connections in the brain. There were and are advantages to sticking with traditional techniques. Unitil about 12, most students learn primarily bodily/kinesthetically. The abacus use also develops visual/spatial ability which is building connections in the logic area of the brain. Some people are particularly adept at this style of learning with any type of material - such as the students in this interesting video. Information retrival, identifying unnameable spatial patterns in the brain which are recognized as the information needed at that moment in time, is for most of us verbal/linguistic material. Most education concentrates on primarily verbal/linguistic learning. It's great when schools develop other learning modalities and applying them to areas such as math. Imagine if more education was geared in this direction whether abacus, music, problem solving, etc. we'd have a lot more talent explored and developed. Thanks for the post. I forwarded it to several colleagues who I'm sure will appreciate it.
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The Clarinet Pages
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