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My first piano teacher was very artsy and whimsical, she and I simply were never able to establish any connection as I have always been a very logical learner. I suffered under her for almost 10 years as a child while she tried to teach music to me in the way that made sense to her.

My latest piano teacher was a professor and specialised in the pedagogy of music so he was more than equipped to deal with an overthinking logical type music student like myself.

Learning music and an instrument can and should be quite intuitive. And as performing is quite expressive, music can attract people that stereotypical creative type who just wants to play and feel music. But the study of music theory and classical music are quite rigorous subjects and they can be attractive to logical thinkers who thrive learning all the nomenclature. But knowing the nomenclature is not strictly necessary to play music and so you have this disconnect between the very diverse spectrum of people drawn to music.

In fact, there is a certain inescapable intuitiveness to music and the professor taught me to really learn to via feeling and establish feedback loops that always come back to the sound and my own motor sensations (did you achieve the sound you want while playing freely?). You can't really logic things like that and if anything it's more like a sport than something you can science when every person's body and dimensions are different.

I am now having singing classes and singing is even more mindbending than piano has ever been

That resonates for me. I spend lot of time teaching volunteers. Early on, I encourage them to learn the skill from me, but also take any opportunity to have others explain and demonstrate the same thing to them. I tend to work from first principles, explaining how the pump functions and why that means water goes in here and out there, and what different configurations of valves are therefore valid and which ones will never do anything useful. Others often explain it in terms of which valves to turn in which order to achieve a given outcome.

Neither is right or wrong. Most people will be left pretty cold by one explanation while the other will land neatly into a hole in their brain shaped perfectly for it. Which one is which will be different for each person.

I think that there’s value in gearing educational settings towards having a plurality of instructors available on each subject and letting students gravitate towards the ones that work for them.

One of the hardest things about teaching others in my opinion is that to really teach effectively you have to be able to meet them where they are.

As in, you have to be able to have some understanding still of what being fresh and new to the subject is like, coupled with the ability to change how you teach something.

I wouldn’t say I’m exceptionally good at changing how I teach unless someone can give me a hint of how they learn best. (Unfortunately, this is one of those things people don’t always know well about themselves and can sometimes change based on context. ).

I try to always stay humble in that 1. I know I’m not the best at anything I’m teaching. 2. Usually if someone isn’t understanding, it’s 100% on how I’m communicating, and 3. Really it’s both of us learning - many insights can come from those new to material at times.

Those are abbreviated and perhaps not communicated in the best way.

But 100% a plurality of instructors, and techniques, is incredibly helpful.

I once heard, that a masters degree qualifies one to teach the subject matter. To do so, you had to organize the material in a way to accommodate students with different backgrounds, learning, and thinking process. In the process of doing so, you come to explore the limitations of your own understanding of the subject.

> I am now having singing classes and singing is even more mindbending than piano has ever been

The thing that drives me crazy about singing is that while I don't have a trained ear, much less perfect pitch, when I made a spectrogram of my voice I was more or less correct in terms of pitch. Apparently it's enough to do this for years to have some frequencies baked in.

As in without a reference you were still correct for pitch from muscle memory? I think I saw on HN that they no longer think perfect pitch is something you're born with and is essentially based on what I think you are saying. You have a few rock solid internal pitches and then you can do very fast recall. Although the people I know with perfect pitch hear everything as pitches - the sound of cars, footsteps the washing machine etc

> As in without a reference you were still correct for pitch from muscle memory?

Yes, exactly. If I try to sing a melody I'll be off by a few semitones, because well, no real musical training whatsoever, but I'll fall within the usual frequency buckets. Singing in a choir I always needed to rely on others to start, which is not ideal.

> Although the people I know with perfect pitch hear everything as pitches - the sound of cars, footsteps the washing machine etc

That sounds like hell.

I've seen exactly the same thing in Latin, where instead of learning "nominative", "accusative" and "genitive" cases for nouns, pupils were told about "case 1", "case 2" and "case 3". First, this disconnects their knowledge from the previous centuries of knowledge about Latin grammar. Second, it relies on the assumption that long Latinate words must be difficult, whereas meaningless numbers must be easy. So silly.

My elementary school music teacher was very schoolmarmish and prim -- almost like Ana Gasteyer's Bobbi Mohan-Culp character -- and had training in opera performance. She also did the "ta"/"titi" thing, but backwards. She would, for example, teach us a ta/titi sequence -- writing the notes on the board, teaching us the names and shapes of the notes, having us sing/perform it several times -- and only then reveal the lyrics to be "Baa Baa Black Sheep, have you any wool?" Her years of musical training taught her that getting the details right early on was super important. I'm incredibly thankful for having had teachers like this.

It sounds like the teachers you've had who said "just do what makes sense" have punted on the act of teaching itself. They either don't know how to, or are unwilling to, do the hard work of providing detailed instruction and holding kids to a high standard of learning. That's just sad to see man.

I'm struggling to understand what the assignment was supposed to be teaching?

If it's possible can you share an example sentence and then the "correct' translation of that sentence with titi and ta?

I'm no professional, but I've played the piano an guitar since I was 13 and I still can't wrap my head around what you would even get out of that exercise.

But maybe the issue is with me lol?

I may have missed what you're asking about, but the ta/ti/tika quarter/eighth/sixteenth syllable system is a rhythm counting system to teach music, the Kodály Method[1]. This was coincidentally also what my first music teacher used but I didn't know the name until I was reminded of it even existing here and did a little digging.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kod%C3%A1ly_method

I mean just saying that out loud I can exactly see how it works, pretty interesting. Like why do I naturally say Tika faster than ti and ti faster than ta?

The /t/ consonant in the method requires you to have your tongue touch the roof of your mouth, and the /a/ vowel requires you to have your jaw hang low. The /ti/ sound in the method has your jaw fixed in place whereas it has to move to produce the /ta:/ sound.

I might still just be totally misreading things but I don't see how the assignment above is a valid, let alone a normal application of the Kodály Method?

Seems like the teacher really misunderstood what it was/meant for. I could totally be wrong here.

Translating sentences on paper (and again, how? why? by what metrics?) seems like the exact opposite of what the Kodály Method utilizes and its underpinning principles?

I understand the confusion and it's why I wasn't quite sure if I'd correctly identified what was happening. I took sentence and word as the music theory terms sentence[1] and motive[2]. Then translating the beats of an example into Kodály syllables seemed like a reasonable exercise that could be objectively evaluated.

[1] https://musictheory.pugetsound.edu/mt21c/SentenceStructure.h...

[2] https://musictheory.pugetsound.edu/mt21c/MotiveSection.html

You're asking me to tell about a homework from 1988, in dutch, when I was 8 years old. I think the last sentence was 'honderdduizend apen hingen daar te gapen' being translated to 'titi titi ta ta. Titi titi ta ta'.

The weird thing is: I could do it, even if I had no idea what I was doing. There was some pronunciation that seemed natural. My answers were mostly right ( Or maybe I got a good grade just for turning something in?).

Also, the teacher was a really nice lady, she was good with the piano and knew music, and she did teach us what she was supposed to. I have fond memories for her lessons. She succeeded.

I just think, the first lesson being a bit if a sampler, she didn't want to scare kids away. Artsy people sometimes have learned that math must be hard. So she accidentally oversimplified for me. I have no idea if the other kids felt the same. She might even have self-corrected starting the third lesson.

>You're asking me to tell about a homework from 1988, in dutch, when I was 8 years old

Well asking certainly, but I'm not demanding? I don't know, seems like a very weird application. I certainly don't know ANY dutch, which doesn't help.

Is it just a "rhythm" mapping exercise based on the syllables? I probably read the first post a little bit to literally.

Yeah that 'asking' sounded wrong. Sorry. Read it as 'dont quote me on this, long time ago, memory untrustworthy'.

As an adult, I can say today: It is indeed a rhythm exercise, with some syllables being longer than others. I just wish someone had told me this at the time.

> I think the last sentence was 'honderdduizend apen hingen daar te gapen' being translated to 'titi titi ta ta. Titi titi ta ta'.

Oh wow, interesting, so the exercise was really taking a Dutch language sentence and breaking it into musical syllables? I'm more confused than before because the example here has 6 words and ends up as 8 notes -- but that could just be something I don't follow since I don't know Dutch. Unless 'honderdduizend' ('hundred thousand' it seems) is a compound that makes sense to split into two?

I don’t speak dutch but a language descendant from it and I completely understand how it would be broken down that way.

Effectively I would pronounce honderdduizend as 4 quick syllables.

Again do not speak dutch and translate the same work into my languages pronunciation which I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t almost identical. “Honderd duisend” if you are interested.

I really wish the top comments on this article were not about the off topic and in my opinion unrelated process of reading music.

Musical notes deal with sounds and possibly with time where as words deal with abstract meaning. There is no such thing in written music. Each note corresponds to a sound wereas for words each letter is effectively meaningless on its own and at least for me the reading process is about my mind recognizing words and associating their consensus cultural meaning with the shape word I know. For me the sound of the word is irrelevant with respect to whether I know the word or not. In fact I remember when I was younger my vocabulary would often exceed my understanding of what words sound like for rarely used words that i knew the meaning of but seldom if ever heard spoken. So I could read the word but might not pronounce it right. Anyway for how my mind works memorizing words has been effective. I don't really understand the phonics people.

I fear this is an analogy for what's happening with LLMs and context engineering.

I had basically the same thought: This sounds a lot like how they describe LLMs working!

My orchestra teacher would just throw us in the deep end of things.

I never felt overwhelmed with it. Compared to other people with gentler teachers, I think I learned more.

The pedagogy you describe has a name and it is called "Lying to Children" by the people who came up with this, and its based in Paulo Freire's work (Pedagogy of the Oppressed), hitting a peak around late 1990s. The same Marxist groups that brought wokeism to the masses.

This has largely taken over starting in the lax hiring standards that came about as a result of Sputnik late 60s. By 1978 most teaching books abandoned the First-principled approach favoring this approach instead.

The First-principled approach to teaching began with the Greeks/Rome (Trivium/Quadrivium); the process starts with an objective real system which you break observations down into core relationships, from such intuitive relations you then build up the model of relationships to predict future states within that same system, checking each time for correctness, and deviations to eliminate falsehoods/assumptions made.

The "Lying to Children" approach, is an abominable deviation of that process, or what many referred to without proper definition, as by-rote teaching, starts with an inherently flawed/fake system where you must learn to competency true and false things at the same time to progress to the next level of gnosis or mastery.

Upon each iteration in the path you are taught increasingly more useful versions of the ultimate model expected, but are subjected to psychological torture in the unlearning of false things which were learned to competency and will stonewall further progress; while relearning the true principles. Those who can put perceptual blinders on are able to pass this filter at the cost of intuition, as are those who tend towards lying/deceit. The process is by purposeful intent torturous, and intelligent people are most susceptible to this kind of torture (it is exactly that).

In Electronics, the water pipe analogy is one such example of this type of teaching method when the behavior of diffusion of charge is much more appropriate.

There are also induced failure points that operate on a lag, to plausibly prevent people from going into science backgrounds using this same methodology. Setting them up to fail through devious changes in grading and structure designed to burn the bridge (so you can't go backwards and are left stranded unable to move forward).

You are right to distrust teachers that do this. They are truly evil people (no hyperbole). Good people don't torture people and gaslight them into thinking its teaching. It doesn't matter if they didn't know the origin of the things they were taught, part of the responsibility for positions of such trust is to understand and comprehend what you do; and many just believe you aren't learning until you are struggling.

Evil people can seem nice, but what makes them truly evil is the wilful blindness towards the consequences of their evil actions; where its to the point where they repeat such actions unless stopped by external force.

Evil actions being defined as anything that does not result in the long-term beneficial growth of self or others (action or inaction).

They get to this point through repeated acts of self-violation until they no longer resist those evil choices (non-resistance), and then in fact accept it, subjorning themselves to it and becoming its plaything.

False justification for example is one such self-violation.

There are a lot of evil people out in the world today because society has followed Tolstoy's approach to non-resistance to evil in much of the policy.

These people think they are good, or at worst not bad, and you recognize them by that blindness, and inability to choose differently.

Torture is the imposition of psychological stress beyond a certain individual threshold. From that point, rational thought degrades, involuntary hypnosis occurs, eventually culminating in psychological break towards disassociation or a semi-lucid state of psychosis seeking annihilation (suicide or mass shooter types).

Wouldn't it be sad if the majority of intelligent people are actually killing themselves because of these things.

Most people today don't recognize torture because its become so sophisticated and their individual education of things have been deprived by past generations, purposefully so.

Torture includes elements, structures, and clustering, and if you'd like to know more about the process to recognize it you can read the following books (in order), most of this is common knowledge in certain fields (foundational back in the 1950s).

Robert Cialdini - Influence (psychological blindspots leveraged for clustering without distorted reflected appraisal)

Joost Meerloo - Rape of the Mind (1950s) - Overview and related factors

Robert Lifton - Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism - Case Studies of PoWs returning from Mao's China during Korean Conflict covers structuring and elements.

I got taught about lying to children at the same time that I learned about the orbitals of the electron and that Neil Bohr model of the atom wasn’t totally correct, by the least woke chemistry teacher I’ve probably ever known.

Even he would read this and think That you were suffering from a semi lucid state of psychosis and he would begin seeking an annihilation after reading this.

While yes, lying to children does induce some cognitive overhead cost—and I personally believe that the act of learning and the act of changing one’s mind from something already learned is in a way painful (in so much as the brain can feel pain since it doesn’t really have any nerve endings) because of the forming of new connections and the breaking of old—I fail to see how that has anything to do with wokeism, other than being “woke” inherently requiring the critical thinking capacity to make those changes in things that you’ve learned.

My pet theory is that conservatives are conservatives because that pain is unbearable for them and they just hate learning or relearning or changing their mind at all.

Which leads me to ask after this ramble of yours: do you suffer from this pain?

The willfully blind by themselves are helpless, hopeless people who are incapable of perceiving things which they have at one point chosen not to see.

The lack of reasoning faculties is self-inflicted, as are the consequences that eventually pile up (without them noticing).

This makes them particularly weak people who bring misfortune on others, who are especially prone to delusion, as well as other forms of mental illness (psychopath/schizophrenia-like tendencies).

When they gaslight strangers, because they disagree with what that person is saying, they demonstrate their lack of inherent moral character. Good people don't do this.

There is an old saying, that's understood by many as extremely accurate wisdom: "What a person does in the small things that do not matter is what that person will do every time, in big things that do matter, when everything is on the line."

You communicated far more than you meant to say for the people who can read between the lines.

One can hardly call the circular subjective abuse of the contrast principle, requiring any form of critical thinking capacity (its fallacy). Critical theory while resembling critical thinking are two very different (mutually exclusive) things.

I'd like to note that nerve endings just send signal to the brain, where the experience of pain results from the processing of that signal. A nerve is neither necessary nor sufficient, e.g. phantom limb pain or heartbreak.