Flowing into Music

How I learned to sail with the current

It’s easy to think of singing or playing an instrument as needing some sort of effort. With time though, you begin to see that it is about flow.

We’re all used to doing things a certain way, and when we begin to learn a new skill, we apply our cumulative habits and knowledge to what we’re doing.

My biases take hold of me and I attempt the new activity with the same mindset I have when it comes to all the things I already do.

The skill isn’t the hard part, we are. We’ve to develop new instincts or let go of old ones to progress rapidly. It’s easier said. It can be very hard to do.

Letting go is something I try to do when I’m learning anything new. More than focusing on the intricacies of the new skill, I need to learn to go with the flow and accept things as they are.

When I began learning Dhrupad, I was used to the sound of the 12-tone equal temperament scale (The Dialects of Tuning). While my voice was nothing to boast about, I was strongly habituated to a set of notes belonging to a different tuning system.

My instinct was to sing the pitches that I could hear in my head. Almost a decade of playing guitar had instilled a great deal of awareness when it came to those notes. The new notes that were slightly different from the old ones threw me off every time.

The problem was not my ears. It was my mind. If I could recognise the pitches accurately, I could easily hit the right notes. Instead, when my guru would sing the right note, I would not hear the exact note he was singing but hear the closest note I was familiar with. Like I mentioned in an earlier article, The Dialects of Tuning, the auto-tuner in my head kicked in and made me perceive notes that I already knew. The actual notes were lost in the process.

It took me almost two months to hear the notes correctly. The moment I did, I finally knew what I was supposed to sing. I wasn’t stuck in my old habits any longer.

The intervening two months were filled with hard effort and failure but what really helped me was not putting effort but learning to let go.

It’s about swimming with the current; not forcing yourself to undo the tide. Acceptance of what is being heard is the real skill that needs developing.

Once I was comfortable listening to the actual notes, I knew what I needed to sing, and when I tried to, I found something else. When singing the notes that I was supposed to sing, it felt effortless. I mean, really effortless. To sing a note that didn’t have pure resonance took effort but to sing a note with the desired intonation didn’t even take conscious thought on my part. It felt more like balancing while like surfing a wave. You don’t try to move — you just react to the motion of the wave.

I could hear the compromises that were made when designing the equal temperament scale. I had become so used to those notes that I thought of them as natural. Only when I hit the pure resonances did I hear what was possible in terms of resonating in the scale.

I had earlier found that using a similar sense of flow improved my sense of rhythm. Instead of consciously thinking about the timing of the beat, I just allowed myself to land on it. I was doing the same thing with pitch. I was allowing myself to resonate at a certain pitch instead of focusing on what pitch I should hit.

This might sound esoteric and self-defeating but it really works. The more I let go, the easier it becomes to do something. My biases don’t stand in the way of learning and I can truly focus on what’s important. The means become the end.

Sometime during the second month of learning this new system of tuning, I understood the difference in sound between the old and the new notes. With this understanding, I would try to hit the right notes by willing myself to not hit the ones I was used to. This turned out to be unnecessary effort and I went back to just trying to hit the right notes. Defining something purely in exclusion of all else didn’t help me. Understanding the nature of the note did.

This is a repetition of one of my favourite themes: depth vs breadth. Diving into a note will help you explore its depths but swimming on its surface will only give you a glimpse of its expanse.

Dipping your feet into the river of music will give you a rough idea of what it feels like but only when you take the plunge and go along with its flow can you experience the full force of the river.

Analogies aside, resisting might not allow you to follow along with the reality of what you are hearing. Your imagined perceptions conditioned by your past knowledge can interfere with your development. When you let go of what you currently know to learn what you don’t, you should find the process to be much more comfortable and enduring.

This is probably part of the message that the late Shunryu Suzuki gave in his highly-acclaimed book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind:

In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.

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Around Sound turns my personal experiences with music, both as a musician and as a listener, into stories.

Improve your sense of rhythm (How I improved my sense of rhythm: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4) as you read about my journey through the world of rhythm. How’s that for combining a lesson and a story into one? :D

Get a better grasp on notes with my 3-part How I learned to speak with notes series: Melody, Harmony and Connection

You might even find these interesting:
The Sound of Water, The Mirror in the Music and The Voice of a Story

You can have a look at all my articles here: Anirudh Venkatesh