How does the brain interact with music?

The truth is, music lives at the center of the brain - in the same area where our deepest emotions live. This has TREMENDOUS implications for music making, music learning, and music listening.

In this session, we will cover:

• The Brain as a Car: How to visualize the musical brain (and achieve brain balance).

• Teaching the Forebrain: Best practices for teaching the thinking brain.

• Training the Hindbrain: Best practices for teaching the moving brain.

• Optimizing the Midbrain: Best practices for training the feeling brain.

This session is comprehensive and can be broken down into smaller chunks for specific contexts.

Is there a simple way to think about the brain, that will meaningfully improve your musical life? YES!

Being a musician who knows how the musical brain works is like being a mechanic who knows how a car engine works - everything starts to make more sense.

In this session, we discuss how the different functions of the musical brain can improve your practice, your performance, and your teaching.

If the brain is like a car, the forebrain is like the trunk - the place where you pack everything you need for your journey. What does it take to make sure that a musician is well packed for their musical life?

In this session, you will learn how to gain musical knowledge faster, how to deploy it more easily, and how to teach it most effectively.

What would it mean for a musician to master movement?

In this session, you will learn the most efficient way to learn movement. We will answer the questions:

• What works when you have to learn to move?

• What doesn’t work?

• How do you create efficiency that is powered by joy?

• How do you practice in a way that connects your movements to your deepest musicality?

What do principals, school board members, and superintendents want most? What do parents and community members think the purpose of music is? 

The truth is, we have more compelling and more profound proof that music is the basis of human thriving than we every had.  Using the discoveries in Applied Music Psychology since the 1990s, we will go over proven methods for increasing budgets, engaging your community, and creating real change.

Session Objectives

Understand the basics of brain structure in relation to music production.

Discover the implications of brain mechanics for practicing, teaching, and performing.

Review the strongest new arguments from Applied Music Psychology

Brainstorm common ways to create advocacy opportunities

If the brain is like a car, then you need to know how to drive one well!

In this session, we will engage with what it means to optimize the curriculums and repertoire that you teach for your students’ brains.

Music is a joy - practicing should be too!

The truth is, joy is a source of strength. There are many ways to motivate a student to play and practice their instrument, but joy is the most effective and the most enduring.

In this session, we will work through

• The roadblocks between a music learner and joy,

• Dive deep into the practice map, and

• Learn techniques for returning students to a state of joy during hard work.

What would it be like if your music classroom was full of kids who really knew how to practice? 

In this session, we will work through new discoveries in applied music psychology which show us how we can help our students:

• Confidently work through the four stages of competence and into sublimity,

• Never again get discouraged, bored, or even frustrated with their practice,

• Use the scaffolding skills they learn in their music classes in other classes and other activities - because music makes the best kind of people!

Session Objectives

Understand the basics of brain structure in relation to skill acquisition in music.

Discover the implications of brain mechanics for practice, and how to communicate and embed that knowledge into students,

Create a structure for how to do this work in each attendee’s individual context. 

By understanding more about how diverse brains work, we empower teachers to include more students in musical work than otherwise could before.

Enough is enough! 

For too long, musicians and music teachers have glorified the kind of endless (and inefficient) work patterns that can only end in burn-out. The truth is, burn-out doesn’t help ANYONE.  Not you, and definitely not your students.

In this session, you will learn 

• Brain mechanics made easy for busy working teachers,

• How an emotionally regulated music teacher can uniquely strengthen the emotional and mental health of students, and 

• What self-care practices are most effective for self-regulation.

The study of Applied Music Psychology has unearthed an uncomfortable truth:

We’ve all been learning how to read music, wrong.

it turns out, there is a significantly more brain-efficient way for students to learn to read music. It is easier for the brain (taught correctly) to read music than for the brain to read language.

In this session, we will go over

• The best way to teach music reading (starting at age 2!)

• How to create neural pathways that make sight reading (the physical performance of written music) a breeze

• The ways that bad music reading can be remediated and transformed into better brain-efficient methods.

Did you know that the same area of the brain that processes music is also the area where we feel our biggest emotions? That means as a music teacher, you ARE dealing with your students emotions, every day - you don’t have a choice! 

In this session, we will work through tools which you can use to deal with emotions - yours and your students’ - in a healthy and productive way that creates happier classrooms, more dedicated practicers, and overall better music

Session Objectives

Understand the basics of brain structure in relation to music production.

Discover the implications of brain mechanics for practicing, teaching, and performing.

Go through the common emotional responses to learning music, and review the most effective ways to interface with those emotions. 

Great news! It turns out, stage fright isn’t just treatable; it’s curable. 

In the last 25 years, the field of Applied Music Psychology has unearthed some incredible truths about the way that music exists in the brain.  These golden nuggets have given music performers brand new ways to help ourselves thrive in music classrooms, practice rooms - and even on stage.

In this session, you will learn techniques which you can use to overcome your performance nerves not just once, but forever.

How do you connect your deepest emotions to your performances (and see past the technique)?

There is a way to unearth natural musicality by connecting the sounds of the music with the deep emotions of the performer. This goes beyond technique, and reaches into the heart and purpose of music.

In this session, we dive in to what it means to feel music, how to connect story and context to a performance, and how you’ve really be exploring emotions in music since the day you were born.

It’s common wisdom now that mastery requires 10,000 hours of practice. If that’s true, how can someone ever master performance?

It’s possible - right in your own practice room!

Since the 1990s, Applied Music Psychology has been discovering the mental states and processes of performance. And it turns out that we can replicate that during our practice!

In this session, we will discover

• The common brain activity experienced by music performers,

• How to replicate that brain activity in the practice room, and

• How to make yourself mistake-proof on stage.

No one alive today has taught music to students who have experienced as much trauma as our students have. Wars, illness, political upheaval, and stress have become ubiquitous. And because music lives in the same part of the brain where emotions are created, music teachers in particular must be equipped with more tools to help distressed students.

The truth is, music and music making has the capacity to provide great mental and emotional help. And, it doesn’t have to be done in a music therapy office! It can be done in your music classroom, your music studio, or your home.

In this session, you will be introduced to the basics of the brain, how this new science changes the way that we should approach our relationship with music, and learn to apply this new science to every way that you engage with music.

What if I told you that you could get more engagement, more focus, and better retention from your students with one tool in a five-minute break?

Well you can - and it’s music.

This practical music training gives you the power to reengage your students with the powerfully motivating force of JOY. Proven in classrooms around the world, this training goes beyond listening to music to actually engaging with music literacy.

In this session, we will

• Learn the simple curriculum that can be taught and practiced in five minute increments, that even the least musical teacher can use.

• Find out how to use this curriculum strategically throughout lessons and the school day to reengage students with Joy, and

• How this active music training can wildly improve your students literacy and math comprehension, and

• How to use passive music to wildly improve study and reading times.

Applied music psychology is a very young field. When Paul Farnsworth published the first book on the social psychology of music in 1954, he probably didn’t imagine it would take until 1997 for this discipline to be truly established as a legitimate line of research. There is a world of new information that simply wasn’t available even 25 years ago, and what we’ve found out in those years is nothing short of revolutionary.

In this session, you’ll learn to bring this incredible new wealth of knowledge to the music classroom, in a way that is easily accessible to busy music teachers. You will be introduced to the basics of the brain, what you need to know to improve your teaching, and how to use your new understanding to create wildly improved student retention and even student obsession.   

Session Objectives

Understand the basics of brain structure in relation to music production.

Discover the implications of brain mechanics for practicing, teaching, and performing.

Learn to apply this knowledge to curriculum to produce the most brain-efficient lesson plans

Learning about the brain helps teachers connect not only better with their students, but with themselves

In a challenging economy, private teachers often feel the pinch.

In this session, we will engage with the proven methods from Applied Music Psychology that will not only attract more students, but keep them with you no matter what the economy is doing.

We will cover -

• How to communicate your value to parents and guardians (so they never want to let you go),

• How to deliver that value to students in a way that gives you social proof (and makes students obsessed with their lessons),

• How to market to new students (including what works and what doesn’t), and

• All the practical issues that go with running a private studio.