Practical Mnemonics For The Ukulele

This is a longer than typical entry: to summarize, it provides a technique for remembering the association between finger positions and chord names on the ukulele, as well as for remembering note names in the order given by the circle of perfect fifths.  In you are interested in how to accomplish this feat, then read on!

It is that time of year again when I lecture about practical memory methods.  Last year I remembered π to 100 decimal places.  This year, I am more interested in some remembering some practical musical information. I plan to start my Thursday class by walking through the room, ukulele in hand, telling the following story:

I open the front door of my house and step into the vestibule. There on the wall I see a huge saw, obviously for cutting logs.  However, this saw is extraordinarily curved, its entire length bent around so that it takes the form of the letter ‘C’.  I cannot imagine using such a tool.

Stepping beyond the vestibule, I look into the walk-in closet. .  I am surprised; I expect to see my dog in his crate.  Instead, there is a full-grown jersey cow, cheerfully munching on tall grass-like plants that grow from the floor.  The brush-like heads of these plants take the shape of the letter ‘G’

Walking through the house, I look next into the main floor bathroom. There I see a tall, robed, bearded man – he looks like Gandalf!  I realize that he is actually Noah.  He shaves at the sink, using a large D-shaped tool, much like an oversized potato peeler.

Walking towards the kitchen, I hear a loud buzzing sound.  I stop and glance up the staircase that leads to the second floor.  On the landing, I see a large honey bee leaving a hive that is peculiarly shaped like the letter ‘A’. The buzzing bee generates the sound that attracted my attention.

Turning towards the kitchen, I continue my walk.  I glance down the basement stairs.  At the bottom landing, I see an enormous bottle of rye whiskey.  The bottle is exceedingly strange; it has three long horizontal tubes coming from its side, giving it the shape of the letter ‘E’.

I finally reach the kitchen. I see a small child, a tot, working by the gas stove.  He stands on a chair in order to reach the burners.  He skewers the letter ‘B’ onto a long stick, and toasts it over the open flame.  How will it taste?

In the middle of the kitchen is the large, yellow kitchen sink.  I glance into it.  There I see an enormous, braided, rawhide dog chew.  Someone has painstakingly shaped it into an ‘F♯’.  Ah, I think, a new musical dog chew!

At the end of the kitchen is a room that contains the refrigerator, and has a small counter upon which the cats have their containers of water and kibble.  My cat Phoebe is there, watching me.  She is wearing an enormous, long, wide black tie.  The tie has a musical theme, covered with gaudy yellow ‘C♯’s of different sizes. I think that the ‘C’ stands for cat, and the ♯ indicates ‘sharp-dressed’.

I leave the kitchen, and enter the dining room. On the table rests a large bowl filled with red juice, and decorated with the same pattern as a bottle of V8.  I look at the juice in the bowl.  On its surface, perhaps created using sour cream, I see the shape ‘G♯’.  I assume that G means that it is good for me, and that the ♯ warns me that it is very spicy.

Beside the dining room table is my Baldwin piano.  On its bench sits my mother.  She is repeatedly pounding a single, enormous, black key.  The key is ‘D♯’, her favorite note.

I pass from the dining room into the living room. There, on the couch, reclines a woman.  I only see her bare feet.  Her toes, covered in elaborate nail polish, draw my attention; each bright pink toenail has a green ‘A♯’ inscribed on top.

At the end of the living room, I notice my favorite brown recliner.  A tired policeman rests there, his feet raised.  He is in full uniform, with many decorations.  I notice a distinct ‘F’ on the sole of each of his shoes.  I realize that he is Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair, and that he has been stomping on the Fords.  This has marked his shoes.

The images in the story above are novel, bizarre, and dynamic; this makes them highly memorable. In fact, after designing the images, I learned each of them as well as their position in my ‘memory palace’ – the main floor of my house -- after only a couple of walk-throughs.

So what is the purpose of this story?  Why am I carrying my ukulele when I tell it?

First, each part of the story pairs two key images together.  One image is of a ‘peg’; this is an image that is first converted into a word, and then is converted into a number according to the famous Major Method, which maps consonant sounds into digits as follows:

Consonant Sounds	Digit
s	0
t,d	1
n	2
m	3
r	4
l	5
sh, ch, g, j	6
k	7
f,v	8
p, b	9

In the first image, the ‘peg’ is the saw, whose consonant sound is ‘s’, which is converted into a 0.  The peg of the second image is the cow, whose consonant sound is ‘k’, which is converted into a 7.  The table below lists the full set of peg images in the story.

The second image concept in each part of the story is a shape that maps into a musical note.  For instance, the shape of the saw in the first story image brings to mind the note ‘C’, while the shapes of the heads of grass in the second story image brings to mind the note ‘G’.  The table below also provides the full set of note images.

The purpose of the story is to help me remember key information about the ukulele.  Currently, I am learning ‘closed form’ chords.  These chords involve pressing down each of the four strings of the instrument.  They are practical because one can move the same chord shape up and down the fret board, playing the same kind of chord, but in a different musical key.  For instance, if I use my index finger to press down on each string along the same fret, the result will be a 6 chord.  The specific chord depends upon which fret I use: if I press on the first fret, I will play a C♯6 chord; if I press on the seventh fret, the result is a G6 chord.

Each of the twelve images in the story connects a particular number to a particular musical note, linking the root of the chord (for the subset of chords whose root comes from the C-string on the ukulele) to a fret number.  So, if I want to remember what fret to use to play a chord whose root is A (such as A6), then I remember the A-shaped beehive on the stairs, with the buzzing bee, and realize that I must use fret 9 (because bee = 9).  Each of the twelve images in the story provides musical meaning to my hand positions on the instrument!

Location	‘Peg’ Image	Image Translation	Major Method Logic	Note Image	Root
Vestibule	saw	0	S = 0	C (saw shape	C
Front Closet	cow	7	C = 7	G (grass heads)	G
Washroom	Noah	2	N = 2	D (razor)	D
Stairs	bee	9	B = 9	A (bee hive)	A
Basement stairs	rye	4	R = 4	E (bottle shape)	E
Stove	Tot	11	T T = 11	B (letter cooked)	B
Kitchen sink	chew	6	Ch = 6	F♯ (chew shape)	F♯
Cat dish beside fridge	tie	1	T = 1	C♯ (tie pattern)	C♯
Dining Room Table	v8	8	V = 8	G# (floating in bowl)	G♯
Piano	Ma	3	M = 3	D# (giant piano key)	D♯
Sofa	toes	10	T S = 10	A♯ (on toenails)	A♯
Leather Chair	law	5	L = 5	F (on soles)	F

Importantly, there is even more to the story.  I used a classic technique, the method of loci, to associate each two-concept image with a particular location in my house.  As I move through the house in my memory, I encounter these images in a particular order.  The order is deliberate: I retrieve the different notes in the same order as given by a key musical concept, the circle of perfect fifths.  That is, the G in the walk-in closet is a perfect fifth higher than the C in the vestibule; the D in the washroom is a perfect fifth higher than the G in the walk-in closet, and so on.   The image below shows the complete circle of fifths; note how it matches the order of the root notes in the rows of the tables above.  Playing chords in the order given by this circle is a standard technique in jazz, and generates particularly pleasing changes from one chord to the next.

I could practice my closed form chords – for instance, all of the 6 chords – simply by moving up one fret at a time (start with C6 (all strings open, fret 0), then C♯ (fret 1), D (fret 2), and so on).  This exercise is excellent for strengthening my index finger, but hard on the ear – it is not musically interesting.  I get the same workout, but one that is much more musical, by playing the same chords in a different order: the order given by the circle of fifths.  I start with C6 (fret 0), move on to G6 (fret 7), then to D6 (fret 2), and so on according to the table above.  By keeping my story in mind, and using its images, I play the entire chord sequence in a musical order, and learn to associate finger positions with chord names.  All without having to look at a single sheet of music!

 

Cursive Writing and the Extended Mind

Recently, National Post columnist Andrew Coyne gave his personal reaction to children not being taught cursive writing in school. This is a growing trend in North American schools, a trend that Coyne finds alarming. Why? Because Coyne recognizes that writing is not just done ’in the head’, but is an activity that involves interacting with particular external media.  He writes, “How we write, in other words, affects what we write. You compose in a different way using pen and ink than you do on a computer.”

I must admit that I do not find myself in agreement with some of Coyne’s specific claims about why writing cursively is different than composing at a keyboard. For instance, he describes typing as ‘file retrieval’, because you have to remember where a particular letter is on the keyboard. In contrast, “With handwriting, you create the letters anew each time, using much more complex motor skills. Whether it’s the flowing motion of the arm, or the feel of the page under your hand, or the aesthetic satisfaction of a well-turned ‘f’, it seems to engage the more intuitive, right-brain aspects of cognition.” As a cognitive scientist, I am reluctant to appeal to intuition or to right-brain processing.

As an embodied cognitive scientist, though, I am in complete agreement with Coyne’s view that how we write affects what we write. The extended mind hypothesis makes the claim that the external world is a fundamental component of our mentality; change that world and you change the mind. Coyne provide some wonderful examples of how his own writing processes are affected by constraints imposed by external media, and I see these as compelling examples of the extended mind hypothesis in action. For instance, Coyne takes advantage of the extended mind to deal with writer’s block: “Often when I am stuck at the keyboard, unable to find my way out of whatever mental cul-de-sac I have put myself in, I will pick up a pen and start writing — and the words start to come again.”

My own experience with the physical act of writing complements Coyne’s. In my final year of high school, I took a typing class as an option, and have long since thought that it was the most important part of my high school education. But as an undergraduate student, and as a graduate student, typing was never my first line of attack. Instead, I would take lecture notes by hand, and would later study for exams by typing my notes up. The first draft of any paper that I wrote was created in longhand. I would then edit that handwritten manuscript, and only when I was happy with it would I type the final version. It wasn’t until my last year as a PhD student that I learned to compose at the keyboard because of the newfound pressure of ‘publish or perish’. Cursive drafts simply took too long to produce.

I am now quite expert in composing manuscripts at the keyboard; most of my current writing is done on a laptop, sitting in a reclining chair in my living room with my dog sleeping on my legs. When I encounter writer’s block, I -- like Coyne -- deal with it by changing the medium. But I don’t go back to longhand. Instead, I’m more likely to activate my speech recognition software and dictate to my computer. (I used this software to compose this very post.)This approach does make me think about writing in a different way, but one more important thing that I’ve noticed is that it changes my writing style. Coyne’s column makes me wonder what would happen to my writing style if I went back to my old ways and pulled out pencil and paper.

 

Coyne’s column also makes me wonder about the research that has been conducted on the effects of writing medium on writing ability. In a recent post, I suggested that the embodied experimental psychologists involved with the Canadian Society for Brain, Behavior, and Cognitive Science were missing the key implications of the extended mind hypothesis. Does removing cursive writing from the school curriculum impact the thought processes involved in converting our thoughts into text? I think that I’m going to explore the existing literature on this issue; this seems exactly like the sort of applied problem that is crying out for extensive contributions from embodied cognitive science.