Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0369: More on music memorization with mnemonics

Episode Date: August 6, 2015

Simon asks about memorizing the chords, melodies, rhythm, and structure of music for performing it at the keyboard. I talk about ways to integrate visual and kinetic mnemonics to make music memorization more vivid than ever. BONUS: Here’s a quizzing set you can use to memorize the key words of this poem: Memorize strange meeting What […]

Master of Memory 369. Welcome to Master of Memory. I'm Timothy, and I'm here to answer your accelerated learning questions every day and to inspire and empower you to learn anything you want to learn faster than ever. Simon submitted a written question at masterofmemory.com slash question. Simon says, Hi Timothy. As a keyboardist, is there a method using mnemonics to remember chords, melodies, rhythms, and structures of songs which I perform? I would greatly appreciate any assistance in this area.

So Simon, in this episode I'm going to build off of previous episodes, particularly episode 212 from Memorizing Musical Themes. So you can go back in the Master of Memory archives and listen to old episodes on music memorization, and 2.12 kind of sums a lot of that stuff up. But in this episode, I'll be focusing specifically on some of the elements that you've emphasized in this question, such as stanzas, verses, and possibly one small section that doesn't repeat like an intro or a bridge. First of all, to learn the structure, I would start by reducing the entire song to one room for each verse or for actually all of the verses since they're gonna follow the same musical idea. So one room for the verses, one room for the chorus, and one room for the bridge or any other element that isn't a verse or a chorus. And then within those, you're going to split each of the

rooms from left to right. So you're going to split these large stations into smaller stations. This is a memory palace, and you're using large stations, which are rooms, which we just mentioned, and then splitting them into smaller stations. So you could split the room from left to right by the chords in the verse or in the chorus. So if, for example, let's say that your first room is a bedroom and it's the verse. Let's say the first chord is the one chord or the tonic chord. That's going to be on the floor. And a V chord is going to be on the ceiling, and other chords are going to be on the walls or on the furniture. So let's say that this particular song that you're learning, the verse starts on I and

then it goes to IV and then it goes to V and then it goes back to one. So you're going to go from one end of the room to the other, and you're going to have your mnemonic imagery start on the floor, and then move to a furniture item, jump from there to the ceiling, and then fall back down to the floor, which seems very natural since five falls to one. So that's sort of how you can learn the chords of these things. And then every time you play the verse, you just go back to this bedroom because you know that that's how the chord structure in the verse works. To take this even further, let's talk about what you're putting on the floor and on the ceiling and things like that. It could just be a character that represents

the song for you doing these things, and then you just have to remember the rhythms and melody of the song that you're performing. Or another thing you could do if you're going to have to learn a whole bunch of songs really quickly is to have mnemonics for the rhythms. So the fact is that rhythm is the single easiest element of music for human minds to remember. It's very easy to remember rhythms naturally. But if you want to be able to work fast, again, if you want to be able to learn songs in mass, then it may be best to start developing some rhythms, some mnemonics for rhythms, which I've explained in episode 190, turning rhythms into number mnemonics. Then the last element of this is while you're performing,

all you have to do is remember what sequence of rooms you're performing. Let's say there's verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus. So what you're going to do is you're going to remember that it's room, bedroom, and then let's say the bathroom is the chorus. Bedroom, bathroom, bedroom, bathroom. And then perhaps the den. And then the bathroom again. If you have that to rely on, then you can remember the whole song

because every time you think of the bedroom, you're remembering all the chords and every aspect that you've tied in there. And then when you think of the bathroom, you can just remember how the chorus goes with all of its chords. And then the one time you go to the den, you can remember what's in there, because that's the one that's different, and it's the bridge with its unique chords or whatever. I hope that helps you, Simon, and feel free to go back again to some of the earlier episodes, particularly 190 and 212, for more information on learning mnemonics for music. For anyone listening, what do you want to learn? The world's knowledge can be yours.

Leave your learning request at masterofmemory.com slash question, and I'll talk to you again soon.