Have you ever felt like you were just bashing your head against a brick wall in music learning? It’s an all-too-common experience, and you probably know already that the solution is rarely to just “keep bashing” or “bash harder”.
Convergent Learning is a kind of “meta tool”, meaning a principle for using all the other tools, frameworks and techniques you’ll learn. It can also be considered a mindset, since it is very much about how you think about your learning journey and the choices you make along the way.
The principle is simple: approaching the same thing from multiple directions or perspectives delivers better, faster results.
I’ll share a few examples below, because I know it might seem odd at first.
In most education contexts we’re told that there is a single straight-line “best” path you should follow. When you read a textbook or you go through a typical training course, that’s generally the approach. You’re shown one particular method, sequence or system, and taught to follow exactly that from A to Z, with the expectation that you will get to the end and achieve the intended results.
I’m confident that you’ve experienced for yourself just how rarely that actually happens!
It’s extremely uncommon for a straight-line course like that to work very well for the majority of students. In some subjects, like learning history, it is a reasonable idea because you’re mostly learning facts. In many subjects it fails because (unless there’s a high degree of really good personal support) students will get stuck and struggle in various places, often resulting in them losing momentum, giving up, and never reaching the end, let alone accomplishing all the results they came for.
In some subjects, including music, it’s simply not a realistic idea to string things together “from step 1 to step 100” in a single, linear path. That’s one reason we’ve always emphasised flexibility and personalisation inside Musical U’s training system, and why we focus so much on personal support. To help make sure members can keep moving forwards and succeed in their learning.
It’s also why this meta principle of Convergent Learning and approaching the same thing from different angles is so powerful.
When you have multiple ways to approach the same topic, three big things happen:
- A large group of diverse students can each find their own best approach within the material provided. The same training can cater to a wide variety of backgrounds, learning styles and aspirations, because there’s a degree of mix-and-match possible, while still leading to the same overall outcome.
- Each individual student can approach the same topic in multiple ways, not only finding the ones which work best, but being able to zig and zag, to keep moving forwards if any one way becomes challenging.
- If it’s done right, you end up with something that’s greater than the sum of its parts. Meaning not only do you get the benefit of each individual approach, there’s a kind of synergy and multiplication that happens, so that it actually ends up being much more effective than any single one of them would have been.
This is really important to understand—because it’s quite different from the norm in most education, including in music.
It would be easy to make the mistake of thinking there would be wasteful repetition, or that if you’ve already come across one approach to a topic you don’t need the others. When you understand the power in Convergent Learning you’re able to get the fullest benefit and make fastest progress.
Let’s look at three concrete examples to help make that clear.
Example 1: Ear Training
This is a topic we’ll cover in depth later in the book, but it will be instructive to take a quick peek now at how we’ll approach it.
Traditional Ear Training is done as dry, abstract, isolated exercises. Endless drills for skills like interval recognition. And there is real value in those kinds of exercises, but these alone rarely get the job done.
Alternatively, some people get caught up in all the corresponding theory, memorising interval spellings and going deep on jazz harmony rules, but neglect their ears and never manage to actually do much on their instrument.
Still others focus purely on the playing. They either just work on instrument technique forever and hope that the ear skills will naturally develop automatically over time (which they do, but incredibly slowly), or they actively practice playing by ear or improvising. But without having done any dedicated exercises, this is a really painful and frustrating process where it always just feels like you’re guessing and hoping.
If you’re seeing a one-legged chair in your mind right now, you’ve got the right idea ;)
The solution is to let yourself draw on the benefits of all three of those. That’s what we do with our “Learn, Practice, Apply” Integrated Ear Training approach, where you learn the theory, practice the drills, then apply it on your instrument right away. It combines Head, Hands, Hearing and Heart.
Not only do you benefit from each of the three components, you’re also developing all the connections between them, and the result is much greater than the sum of its parts.
Example 2: Improvising
Again, we’ll be going in depth on this topic in a dedicated chapter later on, but let’s see how Convergent Learning is at play.
We teach Improvisation with the Expansive Creativity framework. One component of that framework is “Play-Listen/Listen-Play”, where again, we take two things which are typically seen as either/or and instead combine them.
Instead of just playing and hoping the right notes come out and making improvements as you go (“Play-Listen”), and instead of trying hard to imagine the perfect music in your head and bringing it out through your instrument correctly (“Listen-Play”), we combine both of those in a loop. This allows us to both express from the inside-out and to learn from what we hear ourselves play.
Again, we end up with something that’s greater than the sum of its parts. Without an understanding of this Convergent Learning approach we might make the mistake of thinking they were different approaches and we ought to simply choose one or the other to focus on.
Example 3: Multi-Modal Learning
In Part II you’ll be introduced to some powerful mental models for understanding pitch and rhythm instinctively. These are so fundamental and versatile they end up letting you make the connections between notes you hear, imagine, sing, play, read and write.
One reason these approaches work so well is that you don’t just start from “let’s learn to read notes, and then bolt on how to audiate or sing those notes, and then learn how to play those notes” and so on. It’s not that kind of straight-line path. Instead, you’re able to continually approach the same material in multiple ways, or in multiple “modalities”:
- You’re hearing it.
- You’re singing it.
- You’re writing it down by ear.
- You’re composing and improvising with it.
Again, not only does it mean the approach works for a wide variety of students, and not only does it let you do a bit of mix-and-matching and focus more on the bits which help you most, it also produces this “bigger and better” effect than any one of those methods or each of them done in isolation would deliver for you.
Convergent Learning for Musicality
So those are three examples of this principle of Convergent Learning in action. It’s a really powerful idea to keep in mind as you move through this book and through all your music learning.
Don’t assume that picking one approach and really going deep on it will be the most efficient route forwards. Look for these opportunities to come at the same thing from multiple directions, and you’ll find it actually helps avoid a lot of sticking points and keep you moving forwards as quickly and enjoyably as possible.
Often the fastest way to learn something is not a straight line “from A to Z” or from “step 1 to step 100”. It’s to approach the same topic from multiple complementary angles, giving the brain multiple ways to “get a handle” on the thing it’s trying to learn.
This is especially effective for musicality training, where we’re trying to develop both your conscious understanding of what’s going on, and your instinctive recognition and playing skills, and we want to develop all four H’s (Head, Hands, Hearing, Heart) and forge connections between them.
Take a “Loose Grip” Mindset
The Convergent Learning process will work best if you do not try to “dot every i and cross every t”. Try not to fixate on pinning down every detail of understanding every step along the way. Like in many other musical contexts, that kind of perfectionism is actually your enemy here.
Part of the advantage of this approach is that it can flex and mould itself around you, personally, but that can only happen if you take a slightly loose grip with it. We call this a “Loose Grip” Mindset.
As you continue through this book and along the journey of developing your musicality, you’re going to find some things come easily, others not so much. Some things are obviously connected to each other, others don’t quite seem to link up.
Be aware that some of the most magical breakthroughs for you are going to come only if you let things stew and simmer a bit along the way. The human brain and musical ear really are phenomenal in what they can accomplish, and how much of it can happen instinctively and subconsciously.
So try to take a “Loose Grip” Mindset and allow that growth to happen. Let go of the need to take 100% responsibility with your conscious mind for every single step along the way.
Take a Loose Grip Mindset, let these ingredients all mix together naturally… and you’re going to love how it all ends up converging into something truly incredible.