This phenomenon can be explained with the idea of bilateral transfer. Bilateral transfer occurs when a certain task, which has been learned by a dominant hand, is then more easily learned by the non-dominant hand. This is likely due to the fact that during the learning process of the dominant hand, your brain created certain strategies, which made it easier to perform the skill. These strategies would be utilized independent of which limb was performing the skill, that is why even though we never have practiced a scale with our non-dominant hand it still may take us less time to learn than it did with the dominant hand originally. 

            So how do we make ourselves look like we know how to play piano, we utilize bilateral transfer in order to more rapidly learn skills. 

The attached video is an example of me playing the scale exercise mentioned above. The scale is first played with my dominant hand and then my non-dominant hand. Since this is not the first time playing this exercise, no bilateral transfer occurred. However, when I first began to practice this exercise, bilateral transfer was key in learning with my non-dominant hand. 

            Perfecting your visual search methods by utilizing both your central and peripheral vision can quickly make you a better musician by increasing your skill at reading music.

The attached piece of music "Romance D'Amour" is the sheet music for the song I played in "Spanish Guitar 101: Finger-picking your way to victory." I chose to attach this piece of music because of the annotation "1/2 BV." That annotation means that the highest three strings have to be barred on the fifth fret in order to play that music written below it. Without looking ahead using peripheral vision, it would be nearly impossible to form the necessary fingerings while staying in rhythm.

            So how is it that we can perform this extremely challenging task, with ease?

We are able to use both hands separately by utilizing asymmetric bimanual coordination. Asymmetric bimanual coordination involves moving both hands at the same time but in different ways, which is exactly what is occurring while playing classical guitar. This is such a tough task to learn because as humans, we tend to perform bimanual tasks symmetrically (both hands do the same exact task together). Overcoming this “human nature” is a challenge, but it is definitely worth it in order to play music such as the song below.

 

The attached video is of me playing the intro to a piece of music called “Romance D’Amour.” Note that this song involves picking with the three middle fingers of the dominant hand to repeatedly play the top three strings while the thumb of the dominant hand also plucks the bass strings. To make this even more challenging, the notes in this piece of music span the entire neck of the guitar, making bimanual coordination a necessity.

            You have to find a vocal educator that is extremely aware of how their own body works, because if they don’t know what they are doing to perform their own singing there is no chance that they will be able to teach you. I was lucky enough to have an extremely talented voice teacher. The one thing I remember most clearly from my many years of studying with him is that he would always have to perform a specific vocal function before he would try to explain it to me. For instance when he taught me how to “breath into my diaphragm,” this lesson was one of the first he ever taught me because if you aren’t taking a deep enough breath, you won’t be able to sustain your voice. During these lessons, he would constantly stop and take a deep breath himself in order to figure out exactly what he was doing during the movement. After he had an idea of what he was doing, he would proceed to explain it to me, but as soon as I asked him a specific question about something, he would have to stop and try it out himself first. This is because for him, singing was procedural knowledge. Procedural knowledge is the knowledge of a set of separate steps that all combine to perform a task. In this case that task is singing. The thing about procedural knowledge is that it is extremely challenging to put into words unless you are concurrently performing the action and explaining how to perform it. That is why my teacher had to stop and perform every action himself before explaining it to me; he was trying to verbalize procedural knowledge. 

            A good voice teacher can never be replaced because they possess the skills necessary to perform the procedure involved with singing, and they can explain how to replicate that procedure. 

The image below is of a friend (left), my high school voice teacher (middle), and myself (right). This was taken after my final high school performance before graduating. His skills to verbalize the procedural knowledge of singing taught me and all of his students how to properly sing so that we would be able to do it healthily for the rest of our lives. 

            Why is this, you ask? Great question!

            I believe that this “saxophone catastrophe” can be explained using Fitts’ Law. Fitts’ law calculates the time it will take to affectively perform a movement. So for the sake of the saxophone example, we need to discuss the amplitude and width involved in the Fitts’ Law calculation. As width (size of the key) increases, the movement time will decrease. As amplitude (distance between keys) increases, the movement time will increase as well. So how does this help explain my inability to play the tenor saxophone quickly? Well it happens to be that the bodies of the tenor and alto saxophones I was playing were the same diameter, however, the tenor saxophone was much longer. Because of this oblong shape, the maker of my tenor saxophone moved the keys further apart, but did not increase their actual size. This made it much more challenging to play quickly while still being accurate. 

            Wait, but what about the baritone saxophone that is even bigger than its tenor cohort, shouldn’t it be even harder to play? 

            After going back and looking at my baritone saxophone, I realized that although the keys were further apart than the tenor, the keys were much larger so there was a larger area to hit with your finger.

            Perhaps I’m not just cursed to never play the tenor saxophone; maybe I just need to invest in one with bigger keys! Fitts’ Law helped me to finally shed some light on my saxophone catastrophe. 

The video below is of me playing a scale between two different octaves. Both the lower and upper hands only play three different keys. These keys are placed in the same location on every type of saxophone, but their separation and size will be different.