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Everyone seems to be focused on languages but is there something like this for music? Especially instrument specific, for example a card for finger placement?

• jmcannon 12y ago
  Anki is a spaced repetition app that would allow you to create your own cards for this sort of thing (add arbitrary images to one side of the card).
  • qznc 12y ago
    Anki basically generates cards from a table of fact and a HTML template. You can include pictures and sounds. It takes a little to get used to it, though.
• ThomPete 12y ago
  The thing is though that you need to build muscle memory not just memorize the finger placement (thats the easy part)
  • hfsktr 12y ago
    That's a good point. Something I hadn't really thought of. I had been thinking of this (flashcards/learning) for a while and I ended up buying physical flash cards[1] that I can keep at my desk. At the time though I couldn't tell one note from another and like learning anything it seems impossible and pointless to start (and I'm not THAT old). I sometimes wish I had the feedback (stats) that the apps have but I have learned and that was the goal. I will probably end up coming back to this app when there are more languages though. [1] I had downloaded Anki but got discouraged at the thought of building every single card myself and figuring out how to import it all. I tried to find some online that were premade but with no success I moved on. I don't consider myself lazier than the next person but this kind of made me feel like it.
    • jmcannon 12y ago
      hfsktr - I feel you. Managing all your own content in Anki (especially when finding or making your own images) becomes very tedious.
    • mightybyte 12y ago
      I want to reinforce ThomPete's point. Most of learning a musical instrument is muscle memory. I really don't think flash cards / spaced repetition will help you for learning an instrument. In fact, it seems to me that it could actually make it more difficult for you because you would start to associate notes with visual neural pathways rather than motor pathways. To learn any activity involving muscle memory there's really no substitute for hours of actual practice and quality instruction.
      • pkroll 12y ago
        Actually, that brings up an interesting question: does muscle memory act like "regular" memory, with a curve of forgetting and with spaced repetition being a viable solution? If it did, then you could adapt at least some of these SR programs to, say, "perform this piece" or "do the following exercise" and learning an instrument might get considerably easier.
        • gwern 12y ago
          I'm glad you asked! The answer seems to be, while there's little direct evidence on music, in general spacing does seem to help motor activity although the evidence is not as overwhelming as for declarative memory: http://www.gwern.net/Spaced%20repetition#motor-skills http://www.gwern.net/Spaced%20repetition#motor-skills
        • coherence 12y ago
          There's a great deal to performance which is more intellectual than motor, and I'd be very surprised if there were no spacing effect for either aspect. My experience is that this kind of spaced repetition is dramatically effective. I'm working on an app (http://pianopracticeassistant.com/ http://pianopracticeassistant.com/) to manage it, since I found that Anki is a poor fit for the real structure of practice. I started it to help me learn a pretty huge piece (The People United Will Never Be Defeated) with very limited practice time. I've made way more progress in the last six months managing my spacing/interleaving this way than in the six months before that with equally sparing practice. Like gwern says, there's not a lot of direct evidence on music. I'm not aware of any studies in a laboratory setting that were equipped to directly show realistic spacing effects, as opposed to "non-musicians who played a fifteen-note passage once per day remembered it better." (Gwern links the Stambaugh 2009 study in his overview, which is a good one but which I interpret as more about interleaving than spacing.) But even though there aren't good lab studies, there are good expert case studies (The Practice of Practising has a good set [1]). Actual real-world effective practice, as done by experts, seems to combine long-term spacing of practice between sessions with massed focused work on subsections within practice sessions. You also see interleaving patterns of section-by-section and integrative practice ("work and runs") in both the long- and short-term. Amateurs on the other hand tend to practice mostly in runs (playing things all the way through), and I'm not sure how much spacing alone can help otherwise ineffective practice. [1]: The Practice of Practising, a figure showing "work and runs": http://books.google.com/books?id=IW9wKssw2hsC&lpg=PA9&ots=zgcqrs77Ha&lr&pg=PA14#v=onepage&q&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=IW9wKssw2hsC&lpg=PA9&ots=zg...
  • ChristianGeek 12y ago
    You could be holding the guitar with an iPad on a music stand in front of you so you can finger the chords/patterns while memorizing them.
    • ThomPete 12y ago
      Yeah but there is already a system for that which is tabulatur and with music it's really not about the individual chords but rather the progressions and when a little more advanced the melodies and rythms.