Great points! I've seen a couple of papers on CLA for music learning, but CLA is a subset of so-called "non-linear pedagogy", so maybe music education has its own "branch" of it, so to speak.
> I held the belief there was a "perfect way to play" the piano
Yes, CLA is actively debunking the myth of a "perfect technique" which is very popular in sports. Like a coach/teacher is one who knows the "perfect" way, and their job is to make students repeat an exercise over and over again, fixing deviations from "perfect" technique. This couldn't be more wrong according to CLA.
Already mentioned Bernstein introduced the concept of "repetition without repetition", which claims that repetition is important in learning but for a different reason. Each attempt of a movement will have slightly different "inputs" - constraints – and thus can't have a single "perfect" technique that will work for all variations of inputs. Each repetition will be slightly different (hence "without repetition"), and the goal of the proper learning process is to give the body enough "input data" to _discover_ the proper movement solution.
It's important to note that "constraints" is a wide term here, and there are few classes of constraints. Task and goal given to the student are constraints, so the size of the hand or level of fatigue. Even environment temperature, mental state, and light conditions are constraints.
Another important concept in CLA is action-perception coupling rooted in James Gibson's theory of perception. This one was mindblowing to me when I first read it. In essence, the brain perceives the world not as a set of geometric objects but as "actionable" items. What you can do directly influences how you see the world. That has direct implications for learning as well – mastering any skill (including playing a musical instrument) is coupled with perception, as your body has to react to how it sees/hears the result of its own movements.
But the core of CLA as an educational philosophy lays in acknowledging that the actual learning still has to happen inside your nervous system. You can't really "teach" a skill, only facilitate a discovery inside the student's body.
It's really fascinating how it all works in practice. One related concept in motor skill acquisition science is the Method of Error Amplification (MAE). Let's say, golf players make a fundamental error of not shifting weight onto the back foot after swinging. Instead of giving them verbal instruction "Shift weight to the back foot", coach might do the opposite – ask them to move weight to the *front foot*. This will increase the error, which will amplify the signal in the nervous system and the body will react to it as it now feels "more wrong" by itself. It's not super clear to which types of errors MAE is applicable, but the research on MAE is fascinating.
So much of this resonates and articulates fragmented anecdata I've accumulated via lots of learning.
I love the concept of increasing the error - it definitely helps. Makes me think of reductio ad absurbum for the body. Do it more wrong to prove the opposite.
I totally get the idea of the learning having to come from the self and have held the belief that is why taichi and yoga use very poetic metaphors to describe their movements. This was a solution our extremely smart predecessors came up with to be prescriptive without being prescriptive to teach motor skills.
Just like my singing teacher telling me to stop thinking and just be a parrot and copy the pitch (which worked almost instantly)
I will definitely be digging into CLA thanks for sharing!
Yes, the core idea here is that our perceptual system wasn't evolutionarily designed to just scan the world around us and reconstruct it inside our heads. It evolved to keep us in contact with action-relevant properties of the world we're acting in. I.e. we're not just looking for the shapes/objects/textures, we're looking for the things we can action upon ("_affordances_") and that heavily depends on what actions you can perform.
We don't see the chair as a 3D object, we see it as an affordance to sit (along with a wide windowsill or gym ball). The wall is a barrier for an elderly person, but an affordance to the parcour performer. The pole dancer perceives the lamp post very differently from the non-pole dancer. An experienced tennis player sees the ball in mid-air as much bigger than the newbie player. Fatigued hiker perceives the hill as much steeper than full-of-energy hiker. If an athlete is more capable, objects like a baseball or tennis ball, or basketball hoop look bigger.
Gibson's theory on affordances started with his 1979 book "The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception". My understanding is that it has some criticisms, but still considered as one of the leading theories in perception studies and is heavily used in the design community.
> I held the belief there was a "perfect way to play" the piano
Yes, CLA is actively debunking the myth of a "perfect technique" which is very popular in sports. Like a coach/teacher is one who knows the "perfect" way, and their job is to make students repeat an exercise over and over again, fixing deviations from "perfect" technique. This couldn't be more wrong according to CLA.
Already mentioned Bernstein introduced the concept of "repetition without repetition", which claims that repetition is important in learning but for a different reason. Each attempt of a movement will have slightly different "inputs" - constraints – and thus can't have a single "perfect" technique that will work for all variations of inputs. Each repetition will be slightly different (hence "without repetition"), and the goal of the proper learning process is to give the body enough "input data" to _discover_ the proper movement solution.
It's important to note that "constraints" is a wide term here, and there are few classes of constraints. Task and goal given to the student are constraints, so the size of the hand or level of fatigue. Even environment temperature, mental state, and light conditions are constraints.
Another important concept in CLA is action-perception coupling rooted in James Gibson's theory of perception. This one was mindblowing to me when I first read it. In essence, the brain perceives the world not as a set of geometric objects but as "actionable" items. What you can do directly influences how you see the world. That has direct implications for learning as well – mastering any skill (including playing a musical instrument) is coupled with perception, as your body has to react to how it sees/hears the result of its own movements.
But the core of CLA as an educational philosophy lays in acknowledging that the actual learning still has to happen inside your nervous system. You can't really "teach" a skill, only facilitate a discovery inside the student's body.
It's really fascinating how it all works in practice. One related concept in motor skill acquisition science is the Method of Error Amplification (MAE). Let's say, golf players make a fundamental error of not shifting weight onto the back foot after swinging. Instead of giving them verbal instruction "Shift weight to the back foot", coach might do the opposite – ask them to move weight to the *front foot*. This will increase the error, which will amplify the signal in the nervous system and the body will react to it as it now feels "more wrong" by itself. It's not super clear to which types of errors MAE is applicable, but the research on MAE is fascinating.