Superlearning: Interleaving - The Musicality Book

One of the first ideas from the research into accelerated learning which started to gain mainstream awareness among music learners was Interleaving.

Remember the description of a traditional practice session above, where we spent 10 minutes on Piece A, then 10 minutes on Piece B, and then 10 minutes on Piece C? With Interleaved Practice you might still spend the same total amount of time on each piece, but instead of practicing each in turn, you interleave them. For example, you might spend 3 minutes on Piece A, 3 minutes on Piece B, 3 minutes on Piece C, and then return to Piece A for another 3 minutes, and so on.

Like so many things in Superlearning, this is somewhat counter-intuitive, given everything we know about the power of focus, and the importance of “not jumping around from thing to thing”. But in fact, interleaving has been shown to be much more efficient overall .

You can see Interleaving as a kind of Contextual Interference: by switching task, we prevent the brain from starting to tune out or go on “autopilot”, recruiting its full attention once more for the new task.

We’re also leveraging “The Power of Not Finishing”, allowing our subconscious mind to be churning away on the previous task even while we consciously engage with the new task.

There are also opportunities for Convergent Learning, in which we can (consciously or subconsciously) transfer what we are learning from one piece or activity to another.

The result: we make a lot more progress with each of the tasks by interleaving our time spent on each.

Interleaving can be planned out in advance, or be more “improvised” based on Deliberate Practice decisions. Simply having a clock or timer in sight when you practice can help you stay mindful of everything you want to cover and avoid practicing something for longer than is optimal.

As a starting point, you can try interleaving five-minute time segments, though anything from one or two minutes up to ten minutes can be effective, depending on what you’re working on and the particular practice strategy being used during that time.

Task vs. Time

Many of us have been taught, often as children, that we should practice for a certain amount of time each day. We watch the clock tick. 27 minutes… 28… 29… Done! We might even have had checklists that we turned in to our teacher each week, showing that we had “done our 30 minutes a day”.

You probably know all too well from experience though that merely “putting in the time” does not guarantee progress. And as we’ve been uncovering in this chapter, most of the methods which do guarantee progress don’t involve any pre-set timing at all.

In most areas of our lives, we think in terms of task, not time. For example, when we wash the dishes, we start when they are dirty and finish when they are clean. If we wash them in 10 minutes rather than 20, we don’t chide ourselves that we didn’t spend enough time washing dishes!

When we practice music by task rather than time, as we have been learning to throughout this chapter, we can be much more efficient, focused, and attentive, rather that just filling up the time with less productive practice activities. When we do use timed practice, we can use time as a limit to keep our brains alert, rather than something empty that we have to somehow fill.

The idea here is simple. It may still be helpful to set aside say 30 minutes each day for “music practice”, but that’s purely for the sake of scheduling our lives. When it comes to the practice session itself, all you need is a list of practice activities you want to include (e.g. the exercises, the pieces, musicality training) and trust the Deliberate Practice loop to tell you when to move on.

For example, in the past you might have set aside 10 minutes to play through older repertoire to keep it “fresh”. Now, armed with your list of pieces in Retrieval Practice, you know exactly the tasks you need to include, and playing through them more than once would defeat the point. Or you might previously have allocated 10 minutes for a new piece you’re working on. Now you might decide your goal is to really iron out the kinks in bars 36-40 and use Deliberate Practice and Contextual Interference to get it playable at 90 BPM. You don’t need to spend endless time on it until you crack it, nor berate yourself if you don’t—because you know the power of not finishing, Convergent Learning, and sleep for forming that mental representation you’re aiming for.

It is often helpful to have an overall plan in mind before the practice session. You can start by allocating 5 minutes each to your Deliberate Practice segments and the length of each song/piece for your Retrieval Practice segments. Remember, you can do more than one 5-minute segment on a task during a practice session, as long as it’s interleaved with something else.

Once you become more familiar with the art of practice, your Deliberate Practice reflections may guide you to use different segment lengths, say from 1 to 10 minutes.

Composed vs. Improvised Practice

In thinking about our practice as a musical experience, we can “compose” our experience in much the same way as a composer composes music. Rather than the traditional fixed “practice routine” or the “blank page” of deciding everything on-the-fly, we can apply Plan-Play-Reflect to each practice session.

As you shift to thinking in terms of Deliberate Practice, and separating Encoding from Retrieval Practice, you’ll naturally start to see what to work on next. There will probably be many things you know need attention!

There won’t be a strict hierarchy of priorities and there is no one “right answer” to what to work on next. Let that be liberating and exciting rather than intimidating. The wonderful thing here is that if you trust yourself and stay true to Deliberate Practice, you can feel confident that your practice time will always be well used.

Composed Practice is where we intentionally plan the practice session in advance. You might write it down, or it may be simple enough that you don’t need to. Either way, you begin the session knowing clearly the tasks you want to tackle, and perhaps also how long to spend on each (for example when using Interleaving).

This is a great fit when we’re wanting to build up our repertoire, since there can be so many pieces in the Encoding and Retrieval Practice stages, we need to be organised and intentional about which to include in each practice session.

The alternative is Improvised Practice, where we embrace the “blank page” opportunity of each practice session. From the traditional viewpoint this could be seen as disorganised, irresponsible, or even messy. But again, Deliberate Practice is the silver bullet!

You can, quite reasonably, show up to each practice session without having made a plan in advance, armed only with your sense of which things you’re interested to work on, and use Deliberate Practice to continually decide where to spend your next minutes.

This can be a particularly great fit if you’re eager to explore Creative Contextual Interference and incorporating musicality training into repertoire work, because when you’re feeling inspired and in the flow (more on that below), the last thing you want is a timer to dictate that you move on to something completely different.

Ideas like “What if?” practice, “improvise to learn”, “just play” and the other creative concepts introduced in this chapter will ensure that you can find your way out of any box and keep your Superlearning vibrant, fresh, and successful.

It’s worth noting that even our most carefully planned Composed Practice can never be 100% predictable, since Plan-Play-Reflect will always reveal new opportunities and guide us to new decisions that we couldn’t—and should not try to—predict.

Remember also that Contextual Interference requires Desirable Difficulty to work. So even if you believe you’ve got your Composed Practice “dialed in”, it’s crucial to always be open to shaking things up as well!

Finding Flow

We often use the term “flow” in a loose, colloquial sense when talking about music, to mean “things are flowing nicely”. We also use it to refer to that experience of “being lost in the flow”, which for many musicians is the ultimate goal, because of how deeply moving and satisfying it can be. Some people call it “getting in the zone” and one of my favourite sites devoted to optimised music learning is even called “Play In The Zone”.

In some ways this is the epitome of musical experience for us as musicians, especially when coupled with a connection to our audience like we’ll be exploring in Chapter 18: Performance.

Although we use the term colloquially like this, researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has actually analysed and defined this “Flow state” precisely, and one of the most exciting things about Superlearning is how much of what we’ve been learning to do in this chapter can actually help us tap into that Flow state.

When we achieve Flow, we often feel a sense of exuberance and confidence. And despite what we might assume, this does not happen by playing the easiest material we can !

One of the key hallmarks of the Flow state is striking the right balance between challenge and ease. We’ve encountered this same idea in the form of Desirable Difficulty. So it’s no coincidence that research has shown that our ability to learn new information and develop new skills becomes extremely efficient in the Flow state.

Some people mistakenly associate the Flow state with more dreamy states of consciousness. And while it’s true that we often feel a sense of altered consciousness in Flow, this feeling is more due to our increased awareness, focus, and conscious attentiveness to the task at hand.

Paradoxically, the attention to minute musical details that we’ve been cultivating through Planning, Playing, and Reflecting (i.e. Deliberate Practice) and our Contextual Interference can be instrumental in producing a Flow experience, both while practicing and performing music. And since we as humans tend to find great joy in experiencing that Flow state, this is yet another way in which “fun is not the opposite of learning.”

One of the simplest and fastest ways to find Flow in your music practice is to continually aim for that “Goldilocks Zone” of learning, where you’re tackling tasks in new and interesting ways that keeps your brain fully engaged and alert. We’ll explore this more in Chapter 18: Performance.

As a starting point, you might like to start adding Flow awareness to your new practice habits by making a note about how “in flow” you felt during each practice session. You could score or grade each activity, or the session as a whole.