I recently discovered Singer’s Studio, an iPhone app for voice training that is approximately the Best Thing Ever (h/t Raemon). It’s a work of pedagogical art, and describing what it does right pulls together various nebulous thoughts I’ve had about learning and developing intuitions for a particular domain.
How the app works: it gives me various singing exercises, and then tells me in real-time, via a pretty graph, if I’m singing on pitch. That’s it.
Okay, it does have a few other features, like:
How does this generalize?
This is a post about singing, but it’s also a post about learning skills in general.
Learning to sing (or to play the piano, tie one’s shoes, draw, dance, swim; all the things commonly known as procedural memory) isn’t like memorizing a list of dates for a history test. There are some steps that can usefully happen in the explicit verbal loop, like “remember to breathe from the diaphragm”, but the end goal is that basically nothing is being held in working memory, and everything happens on the level of microsecond-to-second intuitions and muscle memory. (...)
Implications
This app is a really cool category of thing, that’s only possible at all due to fairly recent technological advances, and there are probably a ton more instances that I don’t know about.
I’m curious where else this has been explored. Singing may be an easy case, because measuring a single straightforward variable, pitch, gets you so far. I can imagine an app that trains, say, krav maga fighting techniques, via video analysis and/or accelerometer data, but I’m not sure that’s possible yet given current tech.
It has me thinking about other pedagogical techniques, though. Martial arts teachers will shout real-time feedback at you ("turn your hips more! get your knee higher!") I’ve taught swimming, and one issue is that waiting until a swimmer finishes a lap before giving any feedback introduces a huge delay, but grabbing onto them every time they do something slightly wrong is incredibly irritating and disruptive. Now I’m imagining giving them waterproof headphones and narrating the feedback in real time (“elbow higher please”, “roll your shoulder deeper into the water”, “keep your head back when you breathe”, etc etc.) This would be so cool.
How the app works: it gives me various singing exercises, and then tells me in real-time, via a pretty graph, if I’m singing on pitch. That’s it.
Okay, it does have a few other features, like:
- A total score and breakdown by % of notes correct after each exercise.
- Letting me play myself back to see what being on vs slightly off pitch sounds like.
- Helpful text prompts such as “keep your tongue behind your teeth.”
- A built-in progression from easier to more complicated exercises.
- Exercises for a specific skill, like switching from head to chest voice.
- The ability to add challenge by turning down/off the piano playing my notes as I sing them.
- Not a built-in part of the app, but I can glance away from the screen and sing without the visual feedback, and then immediately check how I did. (...)
Rewardingness
It occurs to me that another feature, which I think is less key than the instantaneous pitch contour but still pretty important, is how it slightly gamifies the entire thing, and thus makes it addictive. There are % scores at the end of the exercise! And points! It logs my all-time high score for each exercise so I can try to beat it! It also logs how many minutes a day I’ve practiced. All of this makes me more likely to use it, and actually putting in the time is a key part of training any skill.
It’s also cool that I can listen to my voice and, in addition to catching mistakes (ouch!), notice when hey, wow, I actually sounded good there. This lets me gradually figure out what correlates with liking how my voice sounds, and it also gives me a warm glow of satisfaction and helps me feel like a Real Singer.
(I’m not sure if the app is cheating by doing some kind of post-processing on these recordings to make them sound pretty. Normally I hate recordings of myself speaking, let alone singing. Still, I’ll take it.)
It also seems relevant that there’s zero embarrassment factor – this isn’t a human watching me and judging me for daring to sing when I kind of suck. I’m pretty shameless, as humans go, but I’ve been slightly nervous with every voice teacher I’ve had – they’re an expert! they’re probably really unimpressed! – and tension is not good for singing well. With this, I can sing my heart out in the privacy of my apartment, and even feel safe experimenting.
It occurs to me that another feature, which I think is less key than the instantaneous pitch contour but still pretty important, is how it slightly gamifies the entire thing, and thus makes it addictive. There are % scores at the end of the exercise! And points! It logs my all-time high score for each exercise so I can try to beat it! It also logs how many minutes a day I’ve practiced. All of this makes me more likely to use it, and actually putting in the time is a key part of training any skill.
It’s also cool that I can listen to my voice and, in addition to catching mistakes (ouch!), notice when hey, wow, I actually sounded good there. This lets me gradually figure out what correlates with liking how my voice sounds, and it also gives me a warm glow of satisfaction and helps me feel like a Real Singer.(I’m not sure if the app is cheating by doing some kind of post-processing on these recordings to make them sound pretty. Normally I hate recordings of myself speaking, let alone singing. Still, I’ll take it.)
It also seems relevant that there’s zero embarrassment factor – this isn’t a human watching me and judging me for daring to sing when I kind of suck. I’m pretty shameless, as humans go, but I’ve been slightly nervous with every voice teacher I’ve had – they’re an expert! they’re probably really unimpressed! – and tension is not good for singing well. With this, I can sing my heart out in the privacy of my apartment, and even feel safe experimenting.
How does this generalize?
This is a post about singing, but it’s also a post about learning skills in general.
Learning to sing (or to play the piano, tie one’s shoes, draw, dance, swim; all the things commonly known as procedural memory) isn’t like memorizing a list of dates for a history test. There are some steps that can usefully happen in the explicit verbal loop, like “remember to breathe from the diaphragm”, but the end goal is that basically nothing is being held in working memory, and everything happens on the level of microsecond-to-second intuitions and muscle memory. (...)
Implications
This app is a really cool category of thing, that’s only possible at all due to fairly recent technological advances, and there are probably a ton more instances that I don’t know about.
I’m curious where else this has been explored. Singing may be an easy case, because measuring a single straightforward variable, pitch, gets you so far. I can imagine an app that trains, say, krav maga fighting techniques, via video analysis and/or accelerometer data, but I’m not sure that’s possible yet given current tech.
It has me thinking about other pedagogical techniques, though. Martial arts teachers will shout real-time feedback at you ("turn your hips more! get your knee higher!") I’ve taught swimming, and one issue is that waiting until a swimmer finishes a lap before giving any feedback introduces a huge delay, but grabbing onto them every time they do something slightly wrong is incredibly irritating and disruptive. Now I’m imagining giving them waterproof headphones and narrating the feedback in real time (“elbow higher please”, “roll your shoulder deeper into the water”, “keep your head back when you breathe”, etc etc.) This would be so cool.
by Swimmer963, Less Wrong | Read more:
Image: via
