fun idea but "perfect pitch" is a little off the mark imo, as other people have mentioned. i think this sort of exercise would be good for training transcription skills and relative pitch if you weren't able to hear your guesses and the grading factored out global transposition i.e. by always considering the first note correct and applying the offset to the remaining notes
the author invented a definition of "flow" which is different from another common definition which roughly means "getting in the zone" and the result is dangerously clickbaity imo
i do my best work when i'm in the zone and it has nothing to do with whether the work itself is challenging or not. in fact, the more challenging something is, the easier it is for me to stay focused if i feel like i'm making progress
I don't think this contradicts what the author is saying.
The claim boils down to this: you will do your best work in a state of flow, but you will improve your capabilities faster outside of it. Flow is great for productivity but not for changing how you do things.
At a handwavy level at least, it seems to be true in my experience. It is certainly true that not all practice is equivalent, and you can put a lot of hours into "practicing" something without making any real progress in your skills.
Flow requires difficulty that correctly matches skill. If it's too easy, it isn't a state of flow. Rather, it's just coasting on autopilot. Flow usually equates to deliberate practice.
I don't believe this is true at all. If it's too easy, sure, that's not flow. But same is true if it is too hard. Deliberate practice intentionally and introspectively focuses on changing your approach. If done correctly, I think this will easily break flow.
Deliberate practice is never relaxed - but flow can be.
To reference the OP, there was discussion of intentionally focusing on and making the difficult parts of a piece harder as a form of practice. That doesn't bring flow, but allows the flow state later when you play the piece "for real". I think this generalizes well.
No, the kind of state of flow you're mentioning lacks the necessary consciousness for it to be deliberate practice. The emphasis on deliberate: you can either focus on executing over a period of time (flow) or focus on being mindful about how you're executing things (deliberate practice). Sure, there's an overlap, but I think the concerns you'd have to deal with each are completely separate from each other.
What you're describing is more aligned with the thesis of the book "Flow"...namely, that flow occurs when we are at the outer cusp of our capabilities. In other words, when the task is difficult enough to be challenging but not so difficult as to become frustrating.
I can't speak to the relative merits of flow vs. (what's the opposite? self-consciousness?), but I can testify that the vast majority of musicians practice dumb. They just recite, or jam; they don't target the hard part, or new ideas, although they might say they know they ought to -- and more cerebral work like ear-training or learning the combinatorics of music theory (mapping the possible chords and scales, and ways to combine them in serial or parallel) aren't even on the radar.
I think there is considerable value in the "dumb" repetitive mode of practicing a musical instrument. In my experience, it's pretty much the only way to commit guitar scales and shapes to muscle memory. This is particularly vital to playing fast or improvising. My guitar instructor (who was a phenomenal player) talked about playing blues licks over and over again "to get them into your fingers."
While I agree that it has its place, I'm opposed to over-reliance on muscle memory. I believe it restricts you to what you've drilled, even to the exclusion of very close neighbors.
But I'm also not trying to play extremely fast. If my goal was recital rather than composition, I would use it more. My recordings[1] are mostly total improv, free jazz, with a vocals track (later deleted) that states what chord changes are coming up, and then improvise over the first instrumental track while listening to the chord announcements.
I'm nothing more than an amateur musician but I had the chance to study with Charlie Banacos and one of the things Charlie emphasized was avoiding relying on muscle memory.
All the exercises I received from Charlie forced me to be consciously engaged in the act of playing- never outsourcing things to muscle memory.
I think that largely this was to avoid falling into mechanically playing over changes and to be actively engaged in thinking about the music at the moment it was happening and responding to it creatively.
As a musician myself I must say that flow isn’t important for practise, much more important are breaks
Going at something for 3 times half an hour with hours in between is more effective than going for hours straight. And this kind of focused time method also works well for programming. With programming it is harder to decide where to put the break.
Breaks don’t mean you have to do nothing, you just have to do something that is mentally different. When I take a programming break, making music, soldering or reading is quite a good programming break.
the importance of console verification is to make sure a TAS isn't relying on any emulator bugs (such as timing, uninitialized memory, etc) and would theoretically be possible on the actual hardware. it also speaks to the accuracy of the emulations themselves
For a specific example of something like this being important, remember the (very impressive) Watch for Rolling Rocks in 0.5 A presses video from a couple years ago? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpk2tdsPh0A (For the uninitiated, this video presents a TAS of Super Mario 64 which beats the level Watch for Rolling Rocks without pressing the A button outside of keeping it held from entering the level.) It turns out that the route presented in the video actually fails console verification, since the crazy things he does trigger some annoying FPU crashes on console, but not on emulator. There is a happy end, though: a fixed route was published after this was discovered, and it passes console verification just fine (assuming the inputs dont desync over the 13 hour run)
I like using cumulative distributions because they make small changes in the data a little more obvious. e.g. if all the buckets are 10 but there's a section where they're 11, that difference will show up in a cumulative distribution as a bend in an otherwise straight line, which in my opinion is a much easier difference to see
I lucked into this pattern when I used ratpoison. Window 0 was always my terminal emulator (running tmux), window 1 was always Firefox. Additionally, tmux window 0 was always my IRC client. Getting between those apps quickly became muscle memory. I use a more conventional window manager now and it's noticeably clumsier.
I'm certainly no expert in motivation, and can't give you advice on your specific goals, but I personally find that reframing long term goals into short term goals can be a big source of motivation. for example, don't focus on bench pressing your own weight, focus instead on getting to the gym 3x or 4x a week and working on your bench press. don't focus on finishing that personal project, focus instead on making a little progress on your personal project every day or every week. having long term goals is still valuable, but having short term goals to focus on can make it a lot easier to find motivation. it's easy to get demotivated on big goals, but if in a given day you meet every single one of your daily goals, then you've aced that day as far as your goals are concerned. and you'll ace the next day, and the next, etc.
having a job with big impact and big money is a sizable goal that you won't reach overnight. you might not even reach it in a year, or several years, who knows. it's a big goal that's easy to lose motivation on. but reframing it into daily goals, and focusing on taking one step at a time, could be a source of motivation. just my 2¢
