How Your Brain Works: Association and Elaboration

Two proven Memory Aids that every musician needs to use in their daily study and practice sessions: Association and Elaboration…

Table of Contents

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Lesson Goal

To understand how to use Association and Elaboration in your study and practice sessions to remember things faster, deeper, and more securely than you ever imagined.

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Prerequisites

LOVE of music and the discipline to study and practice the right things the right way.

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Two Ways to Make Things Easy to Remember

Let’s begin with two huge insights:

1. The best way to remember something is to make it memorable.
2. If you want to make something memorable, it’s not enough to merely think of that something. You also need to think about that something.

And two proven ways to think about something are the memory aids known as Association & Elaboration. Let’s look at each one in turn…

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How Association Works

One powerful way to think about something is to compare it with things you already know by asking:

1. How they are alike?
2. How they are different?

Such associations build enormous confidence and security because they tap into existing knowledge and build strong connections between different parts of your brain. Of course, the greater the number of and the more diverse the kind of associations, the better. It’s important to understand that such associations are NOT contrived and clever mnemonic tricks, but are based on the ways we naturally think about and experience music.

Examples of Association in Music

One way to apply association to learning music is to relate new scales, chords, and other musical patterns to patterns you already know. Common examples include:

1. Realizing that both a minor triad and major triad share 1 and 5, but the 3s are different (major=3, minor=b3).
2. Realizing that 1, 3, and 5 in a major pentascale form a major triad.
3. Realizing that 1, b3, and 5 in a minor pentascale form a minor triad.
4. Comparing a Mixolydian Scale to a Major Scale and noticing that they share the same notes except for one (Major=7, Mixol;ydina=b7).
5. Realizing that a Major Pentatonic Scale is like a Major Scale, but with the two most unstable tones (Fa and Ti) removed.

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How Elaboration Works

Another way to think about something is to explain or describe that something in more than one way, with special emphasis on the important details about that something. This manner of storing information builds enormous confidence and security because it encodes that information in rich networks of connections that use diverse parts of you brain. Naturally, the greater the number of and the more diverse the kind of elaborations, the better. As with association, it’s important to understand that such elaborations are NOT contrived and clever mnemonic tricks, but are based on the ways we naturally think about and experience music.

Examples of Elaboration in Music

One way to apply elaboration to music is to learn a melody as much more than just a sequence of dots or letter names. If you take the time to learn the melody in other ways–by singing it aloud, analyzing it in functional terms using Solfege, internalizing the rhythm pattern, relating it to the underlying harmony, seeing the visuospatial layout of the notes on the keyboard, relating it to scales and chords you already know, and connecting all the above to your fingering and choreography. Such elaborations illustrate the value of learning to play using all four musical intelligences: ears, intellect, eyes, and muscles.

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Takeaways

There are at least seven big takeaways:

1. It’s easy for our brains to forget things if we only know them in one way.
2. The best way to remember something is to make it memorable.
3. If you want to make something memorable, it’s not enough to merely think of that something. You also need to think about that something.
4. When learning something new, relate it to things you already know.
5. When learning something new, think about it in a variety of ways using all four musical intelligences: ears, intellect, eyes, and muscles.

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learn more… Practice Habits