10/30/24 If You Can Say It, You Can Play It

This is one of my recurring refrains that I say to my students all the time.

If you’re trying to learn a fiddle tune, sing it out loud. Trying to learn a solo from a jazz recording? Sing it out loud. Learning new vocab in Spanish class? Say it out loud.

It’s like magic. This simple habit of using your voice has magical powers.

You can cut the time it takes to learn something by many times. And what you’ve learned will stick with you longer.

There are some simple cognitive reasons for this.

When we say things out loud—and, by the way, I always have to remind people that saying something out loud means saying it in a voice other people can hear—we are forcing our brain and body to do something very different from simply thinking about something.

Our brains love to imagine things. We can easily fly from a thought about something real into a thought about something completely imagined that never happened or possibly never could happen. It’s kind of miraculous and magical and something we’ve been doing since we were tiny babies. Our imagination is one of the most important resources we have as creative artists and problem solving human beings.

But thinking about something does not force our brain to take the additional steps it needs to actually verbalize something. When we say or sing something out loud, we force our brain to commit that thought to specific words or to specific pitches and rhythms if we’re singing.

We can no longer imagine this hypothetical jazz solo that Coltrane would be proud of. You know, the one that’s super fast and fluent and swoops up to the high note and then romps through those complicated chord changes. I bet you can almost hear it in your imagination.

But when we have to actually sing that solo out loud, we have to come up with actual pitches and form them into rhythms. We are forcing our brain to audiate—to hear those pitches an instant before we sing them. And then we have to hit those pitches with our voice in order to express them.

We can’t just approximate and let our imagination fill in all the unspecified cool notes. That’s a crucial difference.

So next time you’re practicing, transcribing a solo, learning lines for a play, going over Spanish vocab or Biology terms, try saying everything out loud, in a voice other people can hear, and with all the time you saved, you can sit and use your imagination to dream up a new creation of your own.