How Your Brain Works: Chunking

An introduction to the value of “Chunking“, how it relates to memory formation and usage, and an invitation to apply it to all your music making…

Table of Contents

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Lesson Goal

To appreciate the significance of “Chunking” and be inspired to make it a routine study, practice, and performance habit.

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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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The Concept of Chunking

Chunking is the cognitive process of integrating many small parts into meaningful wholes called chunks. Importantly, each chunk should be “small” enough to fit within the limited capacity of your short-term (working memory). This allows each chunk to be thought about or experienced without cognitive overload, while enabling that chunk to be encoded and stored in long-term memory. If a chunk is too “big” to fit in working memory you will feel overwhelmed, with predictable results: Extreme difficulty learning, remembering, and performing that piece of music.

Chunking is a huge contributor to music mastery because it simplifies the work that our brains have to do. Chunking allows us to transform the impossible task of doing many complicated things all at the same time into the easy task of doing just one or two simple things at a time.

By the way, chunking is how you are reading these words. You are chunking individual, meaningless things called letters into unified, meaningful things called words, then words into phrases, and phrases into complete sentences. Musical literacy works the very same way. Only the symbols, meanings, and muscle groups used are different.

Sidebar: Unfortunately, most students are taught to read and play notation, not music: one-note-at-a-time. But if you want to play like an artist you have to think about and play in meaningful musical chunks, not as a sequence of disconnected isolated notes.

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Examples of Chunking in Music

1. Reading, thinking about, hearing, and playing a melody as a complete phrase, not separate notes.
2. Reading, thinking about, hearing, and playing a left hand accompaniment as one unified harmonic idea, not separate notes.
3. Instead of thinking about playing with two separate hands, think as if you’re playing with a ten finger hand.
4. Can you think of some others?

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Benefits of Chunking in Music

1. Memorization becomes easy. In fact, you’re no longer merely memorizing at all, but understanding.
2. You’ll learn and perform music as complete musical ideas, with the same ease that you can read and speak these words.
3. You won’t have to try to play like an artist. You’ll play like an artist without even trying.

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Implications for Studying, Practicing, and Performing

1. Chunking is accomplished by zooming out and seeing the music at a higher level of meaningful musical patterns.
2. The ability to hear, think about, read, and understand these meaningful patterns is enabled by studying the fundamental building blocks of music: scales, chords, rhythms, etc. This is why you really need to study music theory.
3. Never play one note at a time. Always study and perform in complete, meaningful musical chunks using all four musical intelligences: ears, intellect, eyes, and muscles.
4. If you feel overwhelmed reading, thinking about, and playing the music, don’t despair. Just break things up into smaller chunks that you can digest before combining them into even larger chunks.

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Some Words of Encouragement

Fluent performers don’t have some superhuman capacity to think about, remember, and perform enormous strings of unrelated data. Fluent performers always play in meaningful chunks they have internalized by studying and practicing the right way. You, too, can do the same, because learning how to chunk music is no harder than learning how read and say these words.

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learn more… How Your Brain Works