9 | sound over sense

I recently saw a clip where the actor Christopher Walken credited musical theater for his unique manner of speaking.

I think of dialogue in terms of music. When I'm learning a part, I say it over and over and over. And it's not when it starts to make sense. It's when it starts to sound right...And if somebody says well that doesn't make any sense, I don't care so much about that. I just care about whether it sounds right. 

Walken’s strategy may have a parallel for how we could approach teaching movement skills. When coaching, it can be tempting to start with technical explanations of how to produce the desired outcome. This is akin to the words in a script. But when I reflect on my exchanges with athletes, what do they sound like? I ask questions like “How did that feel?” And they say things like “That felt (or didn’t feel) right.” When discussing a client’s golf swing, for example, I don’t ask him what he thinks about his swing. I ask how his swing feels at the moment. And he doesn’t ever say to me “I think I am swinging good.” He says things like “My swing feels great right now” or “I am struggling to get the feel.” Feel is akin to the sound that Walken prioritized in musical theater. And Walken’s approach - get the sound right first - has a parallel in movement: get the feel right first.

But how can you help athletes get the feel right first?

With emotional-type feelings, I have heard clinicians say “name it to tame it.” With technical-skill-execution-type feelings, I wonder if “tame it then name it” may be a good way to go. Naming something brings it into consciousness, which is great when you are attempting to manage responses or solidify understanding. Naming may not always be advantageous during the early stages of learning, however. I think about that with children. You have to name them before you know them. In a perfect world, you could take the time to get to know them prior to assigning any labels. We don’t have that luxury with humans, but we do with athletic technique. So perhaps it is best to approach skill like Walken would a dramatic monologue. He would concentrate on how it sounded, and worry about whether it made sense later. With skill, we can experiment until it feels right, and then name that feeling to “make sense” out of it.

I recognize that some initial directions or instructions may be necessary, so below are a few approaches that help guide learner exploration until there is something worth naming:

• External or holistic focus cues: Rather than telling athletes what to do with their body (e.g., extend your knees), instruct them based on the environment and/or the overall feel of the movement (e.g., explode from the block); see Nick Winkelman’s work for more on cueing

• Differential learning (DL): Rather than prescribe an ideal technique (e.g., keep your feet shoulder width apart when shooting a three), ask athletes to try as many different variations as they can within a range (e.g., shoot threes and switch your foot placement on every attempt, ranging from touching one another to as wide as you can get them); see Wolfgang Schöllhorn’s work for more information

• Contraints led approaches (CLA): Rather than give athletes explicit directions about what their body should be doing (e.g., extend your arm vertically to produce more arc on your shot), the CLA leverages environmental manipulations to produce the desired technical outcome (e.g., put a plexiglass wall halfway to hoop that player must clear to make the shot); see resources from Rob Gray for more information

Whether using feel for athletes or using sound for performers, there seems to be value in prioritizing the sum over the parts in the early stages of creativity. After all, I don’t remember Clem’s wisdom because it made sense; I remember it because of how it sounded and how it made me feel!

Christopher Mesagno, Daryl Marchant, & Tony Morris. 2008. Alleviating choking: The sounds of distraction. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 21(2), 131-147.

According to choking expert Dr. Sian Beilock, choking is “worse performance than you would expect given your skill level when you are in a pressure situation.” In other words, it is failing to get the job done when it matters most and when it is well within your capabilities to succeed. The history of professional sport is filled with athletes who have been - fairly or not - given the label “choke-artist” for failure to deliver in a single key moment or several key moments throughout a career.

On the flipside, we label athletes who meet the moment - think Tom Brady or Serena Williams - as “clutch” performers. Some individuals seem born with the ability for coming through under pressure, but everyone can improve in this capacity. That is where this study comes in. Researchers wanted to explore choking objectively and subjectively, so they designed a mixed-methods study with experienced basketball athletes to test whether music could reduce the likelihood of choking.

Design: Researchers screened 41 experienced basketball athletes to identify “choking-susceptible” individuals. Participants completed self-report measures of self-consciousness, sport anxiety, and coping style. Based on scores, five individuals (1 male, 4 female) were selected to advance through additional phases:

• Low Pressure Phases (A1 and A2)

  • 10-shot warm-up

  • A1: 60 shots (6 blocks of 10 shots with 30-second rest between blocks)

  • A2: 60 shots (6 blocks of 10 shots with 30-second rest between blocks)

• First Pressure Phase (B1): added pressure manipulations of videotaping all shots, audience presence (i.e., 8 teammates from sampling procedure), and performance-contingent financial incentive (i.e., AUS $20 for matching A1 score, with additional AUS $5 for each additional shot made above A1 score)

  • 10-shot warm-up

  • 60 shots (6 blocks of 10 shots with 30-second rest between blocks)

• Second Pressure Phase (B2): prior to this phase, participants were asked to listen attentively to a portion of the song “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” and focus primarily on the words while shooting; the song segment was played twice prior to shooting and played on repeat throughout shooting (except for during the 30-second rest periods between trial blocks)

  • 10-shot warm-up

  • 60 shots (6 blocks of 10 shots with 30-second rest between blocks)

Results: Anxiety scores and interview material indicated that the pressure manipulation was effective for 3 of the 5 participants in the study. Researchers analyzed those 3 individuals in greater detail. Consistent with the design, the researchers looked for trends in shooting performance (i.e., slope) to determine effectiveness of the intervention. Participant 1 results are below. The full text contains all the results, with Participant 2 and Participant 3 results following a similar pattern to Participant 1.

Overall, participants improved performance by an average of 19.4% with the music intervention compared to performance under pressure without the intervention. Interview answers suggested that two factors were at play in participant choking experiences (i.e., poorer performance in the pressure condition prior to the music intervention):

1. Increased public self-awareness

2. Increased explicit monitoring of skill execution

take-home: The results suggest that using music as a dual (or distraction) task may decrease the likelihood of self-focusing or explicit monitoring under pressure, which could decrease choking behaviors.

potential translations to sport: This study reminded me of the research spotlight from issue 3, which explored the power of music to alter the emotional elements of memories. In that study, music was the emotional lever in the presence of a neutral experience that added emotional components to how the experience was later recalled. In this issue’s study, music was the distraction in the presence of a negative experience (i.e., choking) that prevented negative emotions from influencing performance. Together, the studies point to the power of music to both shape the emotional relationship with a task (e.g., free throw shooting) and provide a real-time mechanism to prevent a choking response regardless of an athlete’s in-game emotional state.

WNBA star (and 2-time champion) Kelsey Plum recently appeared with rapper Lay Bankz for Under Armour. During one discussion, Plum and Bankz highlighted some truths that cut across both music and sport. In sport, it can be tempting to define personality and potential at the individual level. Athletes are pegged with polarized labels such as “high performer” or “elite” or even “bad teammate.” Plum and Bankz remind us that the environment and the investment from those at organizational levels play a substantial role in who athletes are at any given moment and the extent to which they fulfill their potential. In other words, you have no idea what people can achieve until you have fully invested in their potential.

Walken turned my attention to songs whose lyrics either don’t make much sense or just can’t be clearly understood. It is hard to trust anything on the internet at this particular moment, but stories about songs like Beck’s “Loser” or The Kingsmen’s “Louie Louie” highlight that sense and intelligibility aren’t deal-breakers when it comes to music.

My personal favorite song-that-I-can’t-understand is Pearl Jam’s “Yellow Ledbetter,” which is so unreliable that I won’t even attempt to recreate its lyrics in this issue. In the clip below, the band debates why the song didn’t make the cut for their first album, with Eddie Vedder claiming that lack of lyrics was a contributing factor.

If message boards are to be believed, the song still may not have consistent lyrics (although Eddie Vedder is known to switch things up lyrically when the mood strikes). Vedder’s improvisational approach to lyrics is a perfect example of something I previously discussed in issue 2; performance isn’t an exact replica of some mental model but rather is repeatedly re-created on a moment-to-moment basis. In other words, there is no such thing as true repetition.

?

Pearl Jam “Yellow Ledbetter”

Since I refuse to put anything in writing for Vedder’s lyrics, drop your best guesses in the comments below!

And for more on why lyrics may not matter all that much, check out Why We Listen to Music With Lyrics We Don’t Understand

I decided to expand on the theme from the lyrical spotlight for this issue’s playlist to line up some songs that either don’t make a whole lot of sense or have unintelligible vocals (at least to my ear). Let me know if you have other favorites that fit the bill and I will add them!