Principles of Skill Acquisition Applied to Voice Training

As a young vocalist and voice trainer, I kept thinking that if I could only identify the "right technique," if I could only figure out with certainty which body part should go where during voice production, then I could sing well and I could also be a good voice trainer. Even beyond the rather frightful omission of emotions and art in this thinking, there was a serious fallacy: knowing that you should hike up your larynx to your eyeballs when you sing (if that were the conclusion) is not equivalent to knowing how to do it or how to teach it. In fact, even as my knowledge of voice physiology increased, my ability to "do it" and to "teach it" was not necessarily improved proportionately. A gulf remained between my explicit, analytical knowledge about voice, and voice production itself. At first, the gap annoyed and perturbed me. Then it became interesting. What was the nature of "learning how"? How was it different from "learning that," or "book learning"? These and other questions prompted me to pursue studies in skill acquisition in a department of psychology. As luck would have it, during the same historical period in which I initiated those studies, a theoretical approach to learning and memory was developed that focused on the very distinction that intrigued me: the distinction between "knowing that" and "knowing how." Based on observations of amnesic subjects as well as normal learners, it was proposed that there are different memory systems or information processing modes with distinct neuroanatomical and cognitive substrates: one system or mode that governs "knowing that" and one that governs "knowing how." Few subjects could have been more interesting to me. This essay is an attempt to summarize in a simple way what I consider to be among the most important findings on this topic and on skill acquisition in general, as they may apply to voice and voice training. Throughout this essay, I repeatedly refer to "memory system" and "processing mode" side by side. The reason is that a debate has been going on for a few decades now about whether to consider memory structurally, as a "system," or whether to consider memory dynamically, in terms of its processing characteristics. My use of the terms "memory system" and "memory processing mode" in the same document reflects my decision to acknowledge both theoretical views equally, essentially because I think both have merit, and I think that the distinction is an artificial one. Some leaps will be necessary. Most of the experiments have been done using verbal or hand-eye coordination tasks. None have been carried out using voice tasks. Also, most of the experiments investigating the cognitive characteristics of the memory type we are interested in have been carried out not looking at skill acquisition per se, but rather at a parallel phenomenon called "priming," which will be discussed in some detail shortly. Despite these limitations, I think that it is reasonable to make some generalizations from these studies to skill acquisition in voice training, awaiting the proper studies.