I interviewed Dr. Randolph Foy from the music department at State. Below is a crystallized flow of the notes I took.

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Reading music and playing a stringed instrument is one of the most complex processes that humans perform.

There are two aspects involved in reading music.
1) deciphering notes
2) transferring this to physical actions

Suzuki, for example, teaches students to play BY EAR eliminating the entire complex aspect of reading music. Playing by ear only tackles one aspect of playing music, the physical actionable elements.

Counting, (1, &, 2 &) is a function of the analytical side of the brain. It’s an analytical problem.

When playing the clarinet you aren’t computing when and how to bow but “when can I take a breath”. It’s solving different physical problems.

Gymnasts and figure skaters also solve physical problems by calculating spins and movements.

Computation problem + Expressive problems
(ex. a jazz musician who has to determine what they can do in a certain amount of time to resolve their improvisation. The best improvisation is computation and emotionally rigorous.)

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The above ideas are all separate from the tasks of decoding notes and symbols.

Lot’s of cultures do not have written music yet still make complex arrangements and beats. Learning music is for much of history been an oral tradition. You learned to listen hard and that was how you learned to play.

Playing from notated music is an entirely different “role”. When your reading music your fulfilling someone else’s intent and not your own.

All western notation is symbolic and not graphic. (Key)

There are two parameters to music.
TIME: (all music exists in time necessarily. it unfolds)
SOUND: the sound is also mediated through time. they are interconnected. Sound is connected to pitch which is easily discernible to the human ear. If a sound is off maybe a thousand of a vibration of a second the human ear can detect it and say “that isn’t right”.

Within this symbolic system, we indicate pitch and temporal characteristics through symbols. However, temporal features of the symbols are dependent on so many factors. The tempo of the conductor, or how fast others are playing, the descriptions written by the composer, and most importantly, the way the symbol looks.

Players reference the time and key signatures to decode the notes. It allows you to decode the symbols with everyone else so that you’re all playing the same thing.

[parallel case example: viola players when switching clefts will write the note names (a, b, c) above the symbols. This way it helps them decode because they may know that a "d" means "third finger" in the physical realm.]

How Players Fail
You can fail by mis-reading the notes OR you can technically fail by just not knowing where to play. You can fail in dexterity and not in comprehension. However, there’s no real way to know where a player is failing. How do you verify that players understand the notation and aren’t just failing at technical aspects?

Maybe I can focus on learning pitches without rhythms or visa versa. Is there a way to teach proper decoding of rhythm notation and physical time lengths?

example: Clap exercises verify that players understand rhythm notation but doesn’t tackle the problem of finding correct pitches.