Advocacy

Myths And Truths About Your Brain On Music

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Pacific Standard had an interesting piece about the misconceptions music teachers and students studying to be music teachers have about the neurological benefits of music and music education.  The study was conducted in Germany so the author the article suggests that perhaps neurologists in the US do a better job of communicating the truth about music education better than their German counterparts, but I suspect that isn’t the case.

In the study, both music teachers and students were roughly equally adept (or bad) at separating myth from truth.

“Teachers and students correctly rejected 60 and 59 percent of the seven neuromyths,” the researchers report. Proven statements were correctly seen as true by 76 percent of music teachers and 78 percent of students.

That means there were a whole lot of wrong answers…

“The three most-trusted neuromyths included neuroscientific terminology, such as ‘brain hemisphere’ or ‘cognitive abilities,'” the researchers note. This suggests music teachers, like the rest of us, can be fooled into thinking an assertion is true if it is stated using neuro-jargon.

The researchers warn that this tendency may lead teachers to assign their pupils worthless or counterproductive homework. For example, 44 percent of teachers, and nearly 40.1 percent of aspiring instructors, believed this unproven statement: “The ability to improvise on the piano is controlled by the right hemisphere; special exercises can enhance the performance of the hemisphere.” In fact, such “exercises” would be a waste of time.

You can read the full study on the Frontiers in Psychology website.

The following chart from the study shows which of the myths and which of the proven statements the study participants correctly identified.  As you can see in the myths category, among some of the biggest misapprehensions were associated with music improving calculus ability; relationship between dominant hand and speech and music processing; and the impact of music education cognitive ability.

Among the substantiated theses, answers started to get a little iffy on the subject of the conditions which contributed to the positive influence of passive listening.

As the article suggests, the language used in some of these statements can be a little difficult to unravel and may influence participants’ perceptions. (At least in English, I am not sure if German terminology is clearer.) Questions 7M and 8S deal with similar concepts and probably appeared in sequence with each other.

Given that the survey was administered to music teachers and educators in training, I am sure they struggled with 1M that suggests musicians are smarter than everyone else. The fact that 75-80% answered it correctly can probably be attributed to a suspicion it was a trick question.

Being aware of what claims of benefits of arts and culture participation have been substantiated and which haven’t can be important for advocacy efforts. You don’t want to get caught citing debunked data.

Back in December, I called attention to Createquity project to survey all the available studies and evaluate the strength of the findings: Everything We Know About Whether and How the Arts Improve Lives. That page is a good place to start if you want to get a sense of whether the claims you are making are borne out by research and how strong the results are.

Judging Yourself As You Judge Others

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Something I don’t really often see people write about are the benefits of sitting on a grant panel, especially for an organization that funds you. First of all, the organization will love you for helping them out, especially during the heaviest period in their granting cycle.

Perhaps the biggest benefit for you will be identifying those areas people like yourself do well or fall short in making the case for their programs.  You can get advice about how to write an effective proposal on a monthly basis, but until you apply a critical eye to a proposal from outside disciplines, geography and demographic attributes with which you are familiar, you aren’t likely to appreciate all the potential pitfalls.

I recently participated in a panel for my state arts council for a program my organization wasn’t eligible to participate in.

There were a number of times people referenced discipline specific shorthand or neighborhoods/towns they were doing outreach in. I suspected that this information would be more compelling if I better understood the relevance.

Recognizing that I was probably making the same mistake of assuming reviewers would be excited by similar discussions of accomplishments for which they had no frame of reference, I started to pull out old grant proposals and found a number of places that could probably use additional information about why it was important that certain groups were involved or being represented in our programs.

During the panel review process I made additional notes as panelists would comment about things they wished they had seen more detail about. In other cases, it was observed too much time was spent talking about other organizational activities rather than focusing on the proposed project.

Now I will grant you, often space limitations imposed by the application form makes it difficult to provide the detail that will really allow your project to shine. It is important to make a case with the granting organization that 3-4 more lines of text would make all the difference.  Volunteering to serve on a grant panel can provide you with the opportunity to make that case in person.

I also want to acknowledge that when you are faced with a tall pile of proposals to review, the last thing you want to do is engage in prolonged introspection of the strengths and weaknesses of your own submissions. But it can be worthwhile to at least take the time to make duplicates of notes that represent potential areas of concern in your work for later review.

Then, of course, there is benefit in seeing what other people are doing. What novel ideas and approaches are out there? How are others executing their programs? How are they defining and measuring success? What strategies are they employing to deal with challenges?

One really, really general piece of advice I will give based on what I have seen is to make sure your website has links to your social media accounts. This is website and social media 101, but I was surprised at how many people mention they promote their events on social media, but don’t have links on their websites. Web searches will turn the social media accounts up, but there was often no easy way for someone who discovered an organization through their website to stay connected through social media.  (Actually, it might be more accurate to say that a web search turned some of them up, I have no idea if I found the full range of online presence.)

 

Does Your Experience Need Speed Bumps?

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Via Marginal Revolution blog, comes a story about a tourist spot in China that supposedly put in speed bumps to force people to slow down and appreciate the scenery.

It made me think, is this worth doing in places like museums where people rush past exhibits in order to get to the famous stuff so they can say they were there? Do you set things up so people have to take a circuitous route through choke points either on arrival or departure so people are forced to slow down and take a look around them for a couple minutes?

Or acknowledging the different doors for different people concept I wrote about yesterday, do you clearly mark an express lane for experience seekers who want to validate their visit with a selfie and direct everyone else in another direction so they can proceed at their own pace undisturbed?

Is the purpose as a museum to force these people to stand still long enough that they realize there are other delights to be experienced, or do you allow them to reinforce their narrow definition of what is valuable to experience?

Yes, I intentionally made both options sound negative and restricted the options to something of a false choice. There are other ways to look at an experience often the same person may seek a different type of experience in different places or different visits to the same place.

A couple years back I wrote about John Falk’s Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience. Falk talks about the five different types of motivations which impel museum visitors.  It is pretty clear these categories of motivation are not exclusive to museums and can apply to any arts and culture or tourist visit activity.

I don’t think there are any clear or easy answers to the questions I initially pose. Being aware of these different motivations is helpful and important when evaluating the experience you offer visitors.

It isn’t easy to offer an experience that is 100% fulfilling on all five categories 100% of the time.

Using the example Nina Simon gave in the TEDx talk I cited yesterday, if you have an event about the history of surfing on the beach away from your traditional facility, you are likely to attract an entirely new segment of people.

Consider: What does a person exploring the topic of surf history want out of the experience? What opportunities does a person seeking the experience of being at an interesting event want? What do people seeking to facilitate the experience for others need? What do people with relatively high degree of expertise on surf history want? What about people seeking to recharge or reflect?

A crowded event on a beach may not suit the needs of a person seeking to recharge or provide the rigorous detail an expert is seeking. However, a different event on the subject in a different place might, so you make an effort to ensure those elements are present at this other event and these people are aware of the opportunity. Just be cognizant that while a topic like surf history may open them to the idea of visiting your organization for the first time, the traditional experience visitors have at your organization may still alienate them.

But don’t get overwhelmed by the idea of an expanding multiplicity of permutations. Remember, every person who walks in the door, regardless of whether they are new or returning, will fall into one or more of those categories.  Returning people will have the benefit of familiarity, but otherwise every visit can be viewed as an entirely new experience. There is always going to be some element of “each person, each day at a time,” to every interaction.

If Everybody Sings, We Can’t Be The Best

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In a recent article on Salon, music professor Steven Demorest, talks about the way music education in schools can create anxiety in people about singing.

He cites a scene from the Oscar winning Hungarian movie Sing where a child is told to mouth the words in choir class.

The movie goes on to reveal that Zsófi isn’t the only choir member who has been given these hurtful instructions. The choir teacher’s defense is, “If everybody sings we can’t be the best.”

I have been a professor of music education for the past 28 years, and I wish I could say that the story of a music teacher asking a student not to sing is unusual. Unfortunately, I have heard the story many times.

The article goes on to talk about the negative associations that have become attached to singing and other forms of self expression.

But I also took a look at a study conducted at the University of Calgary that he linked to. The study, which looked at the cultural influences on non-participation in singing, only had 12 participants so we can’t really draw broad conclusions from it.

However, the group met eight times over the course of five months so the researchers had some time to get the subjects to open up about the experiences which lead them to believe they had no singing ability. The ways their anxiety about singing manifested itself was interesting.

For example:

Cathie was so aware that she needed to reach a certain cultural standard to sing that even though she would sing privately in her car, she would place her cellular headset over her ear when singing. This way it would look to the other drivers like she was simply talking on the phone when she was actually singing. She was so conscious of her singing that even to a stranger in the car next to her, she had to send a culturally appropriate message.

What was fascinating was that even with their anxieties about singing, (and in one person’s case it was based in defiance of his mother), they hoped the research process would help them improve their skills.

When they did sing during the sessions, not only were they seeking a certain standard, but they were also expecting progress towards that goal with every session. This expectation of improvement is the second cultural assumption that the participants brought to the sessions. There was an underlying expectation that each individual would improve his/her musical skill during our time together. As the researcher, I had not articulated such expectations, but had inadvertently perpetuated such a view by continually adding on new musical concepts at each session. The desire to improve, eliminate mistakes, and reach perfection was strong in the participants.

Unfortunately, for some of the participants, this added to their anxiety. Some thought that the researchers would be displeased if their singing didn’t improve by the end of the study.

There was something of a suggestion that since singing and dancing are things we naturally do as children before we are taught to censor ourselves, we may have an innate desire to sing that never goes away. In that sense, the study participants were yearning to unlock their ability to a socially acceptable level.

There certainly seems to be a cultural component to this anxiety. The study authors note that in Canada, the media rarely presents images common citizens singing, perpetuating the idea that only trained professionals should be engaged in public singing.

One of the study subjects was from Guatemala where she said music is shared between generations and everyone sings throughout the day, regardless of their ability, even if it is only humming along.

I asked her if she thought she would be a non-singer if her family had remained in this Latin American culture. She laughed and said:

No. Because there is so much, you don’t even call it music performance. It is part of the culture. Everyone sings or plays something and you practice outside. You have people dancing and playing outside. They haven’t yet isolated the performer from day to day life …Even going to a concert, it doesn’t feel the same way as here. There isn’t a gap like the performer, the sole proprietor of the music and we can’t do it. It is just like someone is showing us something, sharing something that they can do and is really good. You can take part and enjoy. Rather than a showing.

Quite a bit there to think about. Where we are now may not all be entirely attributable to the oft mentioned impact of Wagner turning down the lights and expecting everyone to sit quietly and watch.

The authors of the study suggest the fact that both Roman Catholic and Protestant denominations reserved singing as something that should only be done in religious settings and only by a specific set of highly trained people might have also had an influence. Whether this is accurate or not, it is probably just as valid a theory as putting the blame squarely on Wagner’s shoulders.

I mean, there is evidence that parents in King Arthur’s time were dissuading their kids from singing.