<story><title>Brains speed up perception by guessing what&apos;s next (2019)</title><url>https://www.quantamagazine.org/brains-speed-up-perception-by-guessing-whats-next-20190502/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Agingcoder</author><text>This might be tangentially related  - I&amp;#x27;m not sure. I&amp;#x27;ve recently started playing jazz piano, after years of classical piano.&lt;p&gt;Now, I&amp;#x27;m supposed to be a reasonably good sight reader, or at least that&amp;#x27;s what I thought. The improv part of jazz I&amp;#x27;m not good at but I get, but I&amp;#x27;ve also tried playing from transcriptions (Bill Evans in particular), and have found I&amp;#x27;m extremely slow at reading the music.&lt;p&gt;After thinking about it, I suspect it&amp;#x27;s because the music makes no sense to me  so I can&amp;#x27;t guess what&amp;#x27;s coming ( which is what I do with classical music). So while I anticipate with classical music and just confirm after the fact&amp;#x2F;right when the note actually shows up, with Bill Evans I have to think hard and actually confirm everything.&lt;p&gt;My ears help but not much, since &amp;#x27;confirming&amp;#x27; the sound is much harder with jazz than with classical music (it&amp;#x27;s unexpected , so again, there&amp;#x27;s some kind of delay between &amp;#x27;I hear the note&amp;#x27; and &amp;#x27;ok that&amp;#x27;s right&amp;#x27; while there&amp;#x27;s essentially no delay with classical music where my brain is kind of &amp;#x27;primed for acceptance&amp;#x27;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chaps</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m a drummer with loads of improv, including a fair amount of jazz. What&amp;#x27;s interesting is that over time what&amp;#x27;s sounded like (mostly) random noise with no pattern has progressively turned into sensicle flows from moment to moment -- it&amp;#x27;s definitely a predictive process (both brain-wize and nervous system!). It&amp;#x27;s manifested in surprising ways, like having a forward predictive understanding of which hand should be where depending what I want to play.&lt;p&gt;Shifting between large shifts during improv can be mentally taxing, very much the same feeling of trying to remember the name of something or someone. But just like with names, once you get that first mental hint (like a vowel), predicting what comes next just falls into place.</text></comment>
<story><title>Brains speed up perception by guessing what&apos;s next (2019)</title><url>https://www.quantamagazine.org/brains-speed-up-perception-by-guessing-whats-next-20190502/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Agingcoder</author><text>This might be tangentially related  - I&amp;#x27;m not sure. I&amp;#x27;ve recently started playing jazz piano, after years of classical piano.&lt;p&gt;Now, I&amp;#x27;m supposed to be a reasonably good sight reader, or at least that&amp;#x27;s what I thought. The improv part of jazz I&amp;#x27;m not good at but I get, but I&amp;#x27;ve also tried playing from transcriptions (Bill Evans in particular), and have found I&amp;#x27;m extremely slow at reading the music.&lt;p&gt;After thinking about it, I suspect it&amp;#x27;s because the music makes no sense to me  so I can&amp;#x27;t guess what&amp;#x27;s coming ( which is what I do with classical music). So while I anticipate with classical music and just confirm after the fact&amp;#x2F;right when the note actually shows up, with Bill Evans I have to think hard and actually confirm everything.&lt;p&gt;My ears help but not much, since &amp;#x27;confirming&amp;#x27; the sound is much harder with jazz than with classical music (it&amp;#x27;s unexpected , so again, there&amp;#x27;s some kind of delay between &amp;#x27;I hear the note&amp;#x27; and &amp;#x27;ok that&amp;#x27;s right&amp;#x27; while there&amp;#x27;s essentially no delay with classical music where my brain is kind of &amp;#x27;primed for acceptance&amp;#x27;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Kaijo</author><text>I get this. With anything from the core classical repertoire, the obvious major composers, to a good listener, you almost already know the piece before you learn it. With jazz standards too, but there is much more flexibility required in actually rendering them.&lt;p&gt;Part of the article seems to be confirming a neurobiological basis for something quite common-sensical to me.&lt;p&gt;From how you describe your issue I suspect there are things from the more recent classical repertoire that would stump you beyond the level of Bill Evans transcriptions. Bill Evans is still at least in a relatively &amp;quot;accessible&amp;#x2F;listenable&amp;quot; harmonic idiom.&lt;p&gt;Have you tried reading through any atonal&amp;#x2F;serial works of the Second Viennese School? Or 20th century classical composers like Ligeti, Elliott Carter, or contemporary pieces like Unsuk Chin&amp;#x27;s piano etudes, or Birtwistle&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;Clocks&amp;quot;? I&amp;#x27;m a good sight reader too but that&amp;#x27;s where I really hit a wall. This is music that provokes a strong negative reaction in many people. In the language of the article, their sensory expectations are defied. I think to really love this music (as I really do), you will have had to grapple with and deeply internalize things about compositional structure, so that what is a theme, a countersubject, a commentary, a development, an ornamentation, a point of rhythmic or textural elaboration, etc. are all still readily evident to the ear, and thus satisfy the ear, even if it&amp;#x27;s all occuring in an alien harmonic context.</text></comment>