2023-12-13

• I am here to report another significant Anki win. I’ve been trying to learn to play the piano. It is quite challenging. My effort level has been middling, so progress hasn’t been super fast. Recently, I found the motivation to make Anki cards for all the various chords and how you could play them on the piano (e.g. root position, first/second inversion). I started reviewing the cards. Suddenly, my ability to play the piano dramatically increased. In some sense, this isn’t surprising. It’s the same finding from programming, where if you use Anki to drill the basic syntax/core APIs in a language, the fluency with which you write code can increase dramatically. Nonetheless, it’s cool to see it in this domain. My piano teacher has been hammering the idea that I just need to keep practicing songs on the piano as the most important thing to do to improve. I think he’s mostly correct about this, but he underestimates the positive impact of flashcards (and that there is room for both activities in my life). Here’s my conception of what the main benefit of flashcards is at this point. Before doing flashcards, it would take me an incredible amount of time/energy to figure out the chord progression in a given song. A big part of the problem is that even if I found a note that sounded like it was present at a given point in the song, I had trouble figuring out what chords contained that note and what chords would make sense within the context of the rest of the song. Both of these questions are made significantly easier if you know basic chord shapes/structures. Now, after doing the flashcards, I am able to make educated guesses about chord progressions in a fraction of the time that it used to take me. The flashcards have dramatically sped up the inner loop of the rest of my practice. To be clear, I’m overall still pretty slow and inaccurate when it comes to guessing chord progressions. But I’m probably 2x or more improved over where I was just last week. This was from doing flashcards for only 1-2 hours. So, it’s exciting stuff. A classic dopamine hit (stuff I study in flashcards having real world utility). And there’s definitely more juice to squeeze from these cards. Music seems to have a rich set of relationships that map well to atomic question answer cards (e.g. my current cards show an image of highlighted notes on a keyboard and ask what chord it is, but you could extend this to ask for specific notes in the chord, or questions about what chords are relative to a given chord, or what the smallest finger movement would be to go from chord A to B, etc). Having all this knowledge as muscle memory frees up a lot of processing power in the rest of my practice, and makes the whole process more enjoyable (it’s very frustrating to try to learn a song and mostly fail). Lots to look forward to! Oh, I’m also very excited when I figure out a way to encode chord progressions from songs I know into flashcards. I think there’s probably a lot of value that comes from knowing things like “oh, in X song I know, which sounds kinda like this one, the chords go I-V-ii-IV.” Kind of a tough challenge to encode that into a reasonable card or set of cards though. But, I’ve got nothing else going on really, might as well go crazy on this hobby.

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