It’s Better In
Color!
How to Use Colors
to Enhance Your Memorization Process
By Kate Prestia-Schaub
In 1997 when the Lowell
Liebermann piccolo concerto was first published, I happened to be studying
beginning piano with Samuel Lancaster.
Sam was the pianist with the Colorado Symphony and the composer in
residence with the Colorado Children’s Chorale.
He was fascinated with the brain and how it collected data, processed
it, and then manifested in the process of making music. He studied the brain with leading scientists
and his research was way beyond anything that I could grasp at the time. I only remember a fraction of what I learned
from him in regard to the brain, and it’s probably because I didn’t learn it on
colored paper!
Sam began a lesson teaching me
about pattern recognition, which I attempted to grasp, and then he went on a
tangent about colors. He said that
scientists believe that one remembers more when learning in color rather than
black and white. According to Aura
Hanna, in her paper, The Representation of Color and Form in Long-Term Memory, “…color is part of the long-term
memory representation. Subjects performed better when color cues were present
at encoding and test. These results are consistent with those of experiments
measuring differences in accuracy between colored and black-and-white stimuli.”
(p.329). Of course, as a senior in high
school, flailing about trying to learn piano for a proficiency entrance exam at
IU, I cared nothing about what Sam was trying to impart to me. It was not until I won a concerto
competition and needed to memorize the Liebermann that I really did try to allow
what he was telling me to sink in.
“Sam, hi, it’s Kate…remember
when you were saying something about colors…can I come over?!”
I called Sam in hopes that we
could revisit this process that he had taken and developed in memorizing
music. Even now, I wish I had paid
better attention to his process, but with additional research over the years,
the following is what I have learned and cultivated with my own students.
Not only is color part of the
long-term memory representation in the brain as Ms. Hanna wrote in 1996, it is
also widely studied that color is used to represent psychological states. For
musicians, expressivity in music is a key factor in a convincing and
emotionally charged performance. We
cannot hope to pull the music from
notes on the page without including a story, image, or emotion. When memorizing, the brain needs as many
links to the music as we can possibly give it.
Think about it like spokes on a bike wheel, or the 360° viewpoint. How many things can we feed the brain to
create a beautiful and polished final product?
It needs things like the sense of sight, touch, and hearing, obviously;
but it needs intangible things, such as feelings as well. When we use the sense of sight to incorporate
colors, we coincidentally include the psychological states, or emotions, as an
additional “spoke” on that learning wheel.
Our teachers all tell us to
change our tone color. As students, we fumble with this concept and wonder,
“Well, what does that even mean, and physically, how do we do that? How do you play “blue” or “yellow?” We can
start by taking a look at science, to see what research has been done in the
brain and how our emotions are affected by particular colors. Eric, John, and Paraag of The Visual PercpZone website state:
“While
red has proven to be a color of vitality and ambition it has been shown to be
associated with anger. Sometimes red can be useful in dispelling negative
thoughts, but it can also make one irritable… Red is sometimes associated with
sexuality.
Yellow
is a happy and uplifting color.
Green
creates feelings of comfort, laziness, relaxation, calmness. It helps us
balance and soothe our emotions.
We
usually associate the color blue with the night and thus we feel relaxed and
calmed.
Violet
is associated with bringing peace and combating shock and fear.
Brown
is the color of the earth and ultimately home. This color brings feelings of
stability and security. Sometimes brown can also be associated with withholding
emotion and retreating from the world.
Black
is mysterious and associated with silence and sometimes death.
Too
much white can give feelings of separation and can be cold and isolating.
Gray
indicates separation, lack of involvement and ultimately loneliness.”
So, I embarked on using this
fascinating concept of color to memorize the Liebermann Piccolo Concerto. I began by choosing the colors that spoke to
me in this piece, and was moved to use red, yellow, blue, green and purple. I felt that those colors helped me create the
feelings of angst, happiness, peacefulness, being grounded, and royalty
respectively. I then attempted to assign
those colors to tone, creatively transform those colors into a story, and
ultimately memorize the piece.
Associating
color with tone:
For me, the red-angst sections
meant a more focused metallic sound with louder dynamics, a laser-pointed air stream,
and more accented articulations. The
yellow, happy sound, was broad with wide dynamic shifts, varied vibrato speeds,
more gentle articulation, and a bit more air in the tone than in the red
sections. The blue tone allowed me to
feel calm and almost ethereal, generally playing with softer dynamics,
shimmering vibrato, and a very soft articulation style. Green invoked playing with a stronger core in
the body, more support, steady vibrato speed, and a pure tone in the upper
register; articulations are deliberate, but not heavy, as is the red sound. I felt that purple was associated with a
feeling of power, and so the sound was rich and dark. The low register of the piccolo gives that
woody sound that resonates through the whole body of the instrument. To do that, the air is aimed lower than
normal, with a very open mouth acting as the resonating chamber, and the
vibrato is wide and deep.
Associating
the colors with a story:
The red sections reminded me of
two people having a fight and being in a shouting match. The yellow sections were like the sun coming
out after a day of rain, and the exuberance of coming to a realization that had
been confusing moments ago. The blue rendered images of sitting on a cloud
and looking at a castle. The green gave
way for the imagination to climb up Jack’s bean stock, or become the giant
himself! The purple elicited thoughts of
a king standing powerfully over his kingdom with great responsibility – of
course wearing a deep-purple cloak!
The
process of memorization:
First, I copied the entire
movement of the Liebermann in each of the 5 colors. Then I isolated the themes
and motives with a pencil on each sheet.
I went back to what Sam had taught me about pattern recognition, and
made sure that each repeating pattern would be in the same color. Then, I cut out each motive in the desired
color that I was attempting to achieve, both tonally and emotionally, and then
taped them together. Once the movement
was taped together, I memorized the order of the colors on the pages: Purple, Green, Blue, Red, Yellow (times 5), Red,
Blue, Red, Blue, Purple, Blue, Yellow, Blue, Purple, Blue. Last, and I believe most importantly, I wove
these colors into my own story, and each section of this story progressed
musically, tonally, and emotionally.
Because there was an imaginative story line behind every musical phrase,
it ensured that I would never leave out a section. (I can’t forget when the Jack climbed the
bean-stock to the castle in the sky, or what he felt like when he did it and
turned into the giant!)
With those multiple concepts –
color, emotion, tone production, a story line, and pattern recognition – I had
created enough spokes on the wheel to easily and quickly memorize this
piece. The process of deciding what
color each section should be only took a few minutes, as did compiling the
piece with scissors and tape! But the
time it saved me of rote and mechanical memorization was immeasurable. In this way, the story portrayed in a
performance can come alive and hopefully stir up something inside the
audience’s imagination as well!
For my students, like Breanna
Ohler (see her project below), it creates a really fun and creative artistic
outlet, and easily sorts out the massive undertaking of any memorization
task. Scientifically, the brain loves
the stimulation, and when the brain is stimulated, memory is easily created.
Listed below are several
fascinating articles below for those who are interested in further
investigation. As a special note, I’d
like to dedicate this small little token that I have come to cherish to Samuel
Lancaster (1945-2013).
References:
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Breanna Ohler’s Martinu Sonata
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The
Liebermann Piccolo Concerto
To learn more about Kate, visit her Powell Academy profile page on the Powell website at: https://powellflutes.com/academy/masters/kate-prestia-schaub
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