2023-12-28

• I recently added some “visualization” cards for musical chords (e.g. “visualize what chord X looks like on the keyboard”). It’s been an interesting thing to add in this case. These kinds of “visualization” cards aren’t uncommon in my Anki history, having been introduced to me by my Anki guru, Rob, many years ago. I was initially skeptical of them as a card format, but they are actually quite valuable if well structured (which is unsurprising if you remember that the brain is much better at processing visual info vs abstract concepts encoded in text). Anyways, I primed myself for these cards by first creating cards about other related information (e.g. “here’s an image of a chord, what chord is it?”). After mastering those cards, I figured I was ready for the visualization ones. The interesting thing here is that there are multiple “shapes” that you could visualize for a given chord. There’s “root position”, “first inversion”, and “second inversion” that you could test on, and all would have different visualizations for the same chord. When making the cards, I initially just dumped visualizations for all “shapes” into my deck. But I quickly realized that I had much more trouble visualizing the “non-standard” shapes (first/second inversions) than the “standard” form (root position). The difference was so stark that I decided to remove the cards asking me to visualize the inversions for a given chord. They were just too hard at that point. I will add them back after I master the visualization of the root positions of each chord. One of the interesting things from this card was that it really highlighted the difference between when a visualization in my mind’s eye is “clear” vs “hazy”. The root position cards were all “clear” in my mind when I tried to visualize them. But the inversions were all “hazy”, even though the information in each is very similar. Intuitively, I knew that it was possible to have some visualizations be clearer than others for a given topic, but I had never experienced it so viscerally. Very interesting peek inside my mind. I will note, that I was primed for all of the possible “shapes” by existing cards. Aka I had cards that showed me a picture of each inversion and asked “what chord is this”. But I think I consciously/subconsciously handled those by converting them into a “root” form in my mind and then using that to answer the question. The root position cards are thus very heavily traveled in my mind, while the inversions are considered more of an offshoot/not central info. Will be interesting to see how this dynamic shifts (or doesn’t) when I add back in the visualizations of the inversions in a few days.

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