27 | score your performance

To paraphrase my colleague Greg Warburton, thinking is remarkably inefficient when it comes to movement. Sport performance is not an intellectual act. Instead, it is about connecting with a feeling, directing your focus toward the relevant environmental info, and trusting the body to do what it needs to do to achieve the desired outcome. So although we can use the intellect to help athletes recall and name the feeling they have when at their best, thinking may not be the best way to access that feeling under pressure.

Music, on the other hand, has the power to take us from A to B in an instant. For example, I just finished the novel James by Percival Everett. For those who don’t know, James is the retelling of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim. The book came via a recommendation from my sister, who also reminded me of the role that the soundtrack to the Broadway musical Big River - also based on Huck Finn - played in our musical upbringing. So I pulled the soundtrack up on my streaming service while walking my dog, Annie. Suddenly, I was simultaneously in central New York and St. Louis. I felt the humidity as I sat in the free seats at the Muny outdoor theater in Forest Park and wait for the show to begin. At that point, Annie saw a squirrel and brought me back to central NY, but the point had been made. Music is a cheat code for memory, emotion, and feeling.

With athletes, I have seen value in not only asking them to name the feeling associated with their best performances or desired performance state, but also asking them to assign music that matches those feelings. For example, I worked with a runner who associated a particular Meek Mill song with his 16-year old self. At that age, he didn’t know anything other than just going out and running as fast as he could. He had no concept of a target split. He didn’t know what his opponents ran. He just tried to outrun them. The subsequent years of training had raised his ceiling, but it didn’t always help him connect to an ideal competitive state. It was easy enough to create a mix of the track that aligned with the world record time in his event and overlay video of more current race performance with the music. Now he could get the technical benefits from mirror neurons firing consistently with his current form along with the emotional benefits of remembering how it felt to compete freely.

To take it to another level, athletes can even assign different music to different components of their game. For example, a basketball athlete may have a song that captures the desired feeling for a free throw, another that conveys the needed intensity on offense, and perhaps another for the pace needed in transition. Once identified, it is easy enough to create a musical mixtape to back a video mixtape and marry the audio with the visual. In a competition setting, it may be far more efficient for an athlete to simply recall the musical cue than for them to try to steer their way back to a preferred state using only cognitive approaches.

In short, it is fairly normal to ask athletes to score their performances post-competition in terms of a grade for how they played. It may be just as beneficial, if not more, to have them score their performance musically. This won’t prevent them from using their intellect to reflect upon their showings. But it may help prime their performance more effectively than thinking alone and provide some go-to refocusing cues that may be easier to access under pressure. So much of the work athletes put in - technical, tactical, and physical - is aimed at raising the performance ceiling. Tapping into the power of music, however, can help reinforce, or even raise the floor, which may be even more beneficial.

citation

Matthew G. Evans, Pablo Gaeta, and Nicolas Davidenko. 2024. Absolute pitch in involuntary musical imagery. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 86, 2124-2135.

summary

This study focused on involuntary musical imagery, more commonly called earworms. Earworms are those song snippets that get stuck in your head and play on repeat well after the original auditory presentation. Participants (n = 30) in the study were prompted to sing/record any earworms they were experiencing at random times throughout the day. Researchers analyzed the findings, and discovered that participant capacity for reproducing the original pitch was much higher than would be expected based on chance or the percentage of the population who already possesses perfect pitch. In fact, 44.7% of recordings had a pitch error of 0 semitones, and 68.9% were accurate within 1 semitone of the original song. The findings suggest that musical memory may work in a unique way and that humans may possess greater foundational musical abilities than is currently understood. 

potential translations to sport

Honestly, I just thought this study was interesting. I didn’t think too much about the specific connection to sport on the front end. That said, I think there may be a powerful message about learning and memory. In this study, researchers found that learning occurred automatically and without deliberate effort. Given that we ideally want athletes to perform automatically and without conscious effort, I am always interested in studies that highlight how learning can also occur in this way. In other words, we are wired to learn implicitly. But we have to set up conditions to make that the default. Too often, we may be tempted to overload learners with explicit information that could come back to corrupt automatic performance under pressure. This study is just another example of why learning without awareness has some advantages!

I turn the spotlight on a former client for this issue. I will keep their identity secret, but the creative use of music deserves to be known. They were struggling to relax during free throws with traditional techniques like breathing or imagery. A teammate suggested singing instead. Having recently watched an episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine featuring a Backstreet Boys song, they went with that. The short version is that it helped them relax and shoot freely in a way that no other technique had achieved. I can’t quite remember if the client hummed quietly or belted it out, but I know that it worked. So maybe try a little of each approach and see what it does for you!

Perhaps the most famous example of sport and music intersecting is “The Play,” which occurred at the end of the Cal vs Stanford contest on November 20, 1982. It involved several ineligible players on the field and the Stanford Marching Band. Check out the segment below to revisit the event!

I remember wearing out the soundtrack to the 1995 film ANGUS. Here is a line from that soundtrack that reminds us not to let others score our lives!

Cuz all we are is what we're told
And most of that's been lies

goo goo dolls AIN’T THAT UNUSUAL

In the issue spotlight, I mentioned my more successful sister,  She is a historian and a legitimately published author. Check out her book, The Tie That Bound Us: The Women of John Brown's Family and the Legacy of Radical Abolitionism, if you enjoy sticking it to the patriarchy with your reading selections! With honest accounts of U.S. history increasingly under attack, it felt like a perfect time to highlight her work. 

To align with the theme for the issue, I selected tracks that I associate with particular shows or films. They demonstrate the power of music to bring you back to a certain place and time. For example, I can never hear Sam Cooke’s A CHANGE IS GONNA COME and not be instantly transported to the memory of watching Spike Lee’s MALCOLM X in my crappy studio apartment on a cold winter’s afternoon in Ithaca, NY!

Check out the playlist below!