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 Post subject: How "musical" is Sumire?
Post #1 Posted: Thu Oct 22, 2020 1:49 pm 
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I know we have some expert musicians and other experts on this forum. I'd like to hear their answers to three questions.

I have just been watching the (to me) absolutely astounding Murata Natsuho winning the Montreal violin competition at age 11. She has performed around the world with some of the best orchestra, so she is not just a professional but an "international" professional, and not just an ordinary professional but a virtuosa.

As incredible as she is, she is not alone. There is Anastasia Tyurina, for example. Not long ago I watched this SIX-year-old Russian girl give a mind-boggling balalaika concert with a professional orchestra. And of course we can go back to Mozart, and a host of other prodigies younger than Natsuho.

But, strangely for the first time, it just occurred to me that we can't cite any go players who have truly excelled at such ages. There was (rightly) a big fuss when Sumire turned pro at age 11. But let us be clear: she just turned pro, by recommendation. She didn't win any competititions, she didn't get any world tours. And even if you insist that she did the equivalent of winning a competition, insofar as she merited a place in the pro ranks, her competition was just a relative handful of players in Japan alone, and nothing like the thousands and thousands of competitors young musicians face worldwide.

So, my first question is: is it possible that pro standard in go is actually harder to achieve than pro standard as a musical virtuoso? (E.g. because of different brain requirements that mature at different rates?). I'd expect a quick and simple reply to the effect that the pool of competing musicians is bigger than the pool of go players, but I'm inclined to be a bit sceptical of that for various reasons (e.g. over two millennia the go pool has been pretty large; does big pool really apply to Mozart?). I'd prefer to hear these and other possible explanations shot down before I fully subscribe to the pool theory. I would have normally claimed support for the maturity theory by citing, say, opera, where physical maturity seems necessary for a big voice. But I'd have to accept that view would be undercut now by singer Amira Willighagen who won Holland's Got talent at age 9.

My second question is only about Natsuho.

Natsuho blew me away but I'm a weak amateur. It was fascinating to hear a member of the jury congratulate her after she played Vivaldi's "Winter". First he commended her for not playing in the standard way of people like Oistrakh: she, unusually, brought a touch of joy to her interpretation of winter. He added that, for that reason, if he heard a recording of her playing that music in 20 years time, he would know instantly it was her. Then he remarked that she had brought her own dynamics dynamic and ornamentation to the music that were not printed on the page. To me, that's very high praise. But I did wonder whether it was a subtle and polite and so gentle form criticism (because she went off-script). Is that plausible? It may seem that I'm straining at gnats there, but I do note that there seem to be an awful lot of musical cognoscenti who are ultra-sniffy about Andre Rieu, yet I think he's a wonderful musician. Any flaws he may have in technique (opaque to me) are more than made up for by his interpretations of the music.

Don't forget, at the ages we're talking about here, many of us - me certainly - were just about getting the hang of tying our own shoelaces.

So, my third question, to a wider audience than musicians, of course. My youngest grandson demonstrated to me how he put his anorak on. For me that went in parallel with shoelace-tying. He had just turned three, and I was getting ready for a good chuckle as he put one arm in and then spun round and round trying to get his other arm in the other sleeve, like a dog chasing its tail. Instead, he laid his anorak on the floor, put a hand in the tops of both sleeves and then cowped his creels, i.e. did a somersault into standing position, and his coat was on perfectly. Rarely has my flabber been so gasted. I couldn't even work out how he did. But my daughter said all the kids learned to do that at nursery. Is this, like Natsuho's fiddling and Nastya's plonking and Sumire's go, or even at older ages, like Messi's dribbling and Ronaldinho's juggling, all happening because the arts of teaching and coaching have improved by leaps and bounds since my day? I very, very rarely feel envy, but I might if that's the case!


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Post #2 Posted: Fri Oct 23, 2020 1:55 am 
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As a disclaimer, I speak from piano (and carillon) background, not violin, and I haven't heard the performance you're talking about. I use only guesses I can project from the perspective of the sniffy classical piano musicians I know (including myself sometimes).

All the young prodigy pianists I've heard (or heard of) are generally missing a lot when it comes to expressing their music perfectly. They can do the mechanical part, they can play loud and soft as necessary, and they can even evoke a story that runs parallel to the music, if their teacher teaches them well. But we do view music differently as adults - personally I think it's because as we grow up we all have experiences where music touches an unfound/undiscovered feeling within ourselves. Kids just haven't had those experiences and can't mirror those emotional evocations, so even the prodigies will sound a little flat when compared to the professionals. Even Mozart's youngest compositions just sound... childish. This has a relatively minor impact on quality of listening, but to people who make perfecting music their life's work, it's impossible to ignore. It makes almost all kids even with "pro" mechanical ability fail to really be at the standard of a "pro" musician - but they're just kids, so we all let them win some awards anyway.

TL;DR probably the member of the jury was congratulating Nadinho in a slightly snobbish, backhanded way, noting particular portions of the piece where the prodigious mechanical mastery had not fully been trained to emulate emotional mastery, in evoking the piece the "correct" way.


Comparing this to Go is rather tricky. Unlike music, I don't think we really grow into a deeper understanding just by growing older. That said, what do I know about professional level Go - perhaps if we asked some veteran top player like Lee Chang-Ho he would say Sumire's play is youthful and immature, or maybe he would just say that her weaknesses are more mundane in nature. Regardless, the fact that she can objectively stand with "real" professionals of an elder generation puts her performance above all but the very best prodigies in the musical disciplines in my opinion.

Frankly, the common occurrence these days of teens and early 20's being world champions is unmirrored in classical music, and makes it seem unlikely that skill in Go is as dependent on life experience as musical skill. So purely from the perspective of time since birth, it surely must be a little easier to learn Go to a high degree than classical music.


In terms of teaching, I don't think it's necessarily much improved overall, but just more streamlined towards different goals. I, of course, have no evidence.

Very interesting topics to think about!

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Post #3 Posted: Fri Oct 23, 2020 4:27 am 
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@Telegraph : another kind of music (Jazz), but Joey Alexander was absolutely mindblowing.

He was 12 year old here : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpwmTGUflUM

And this is Jazz music : there's no "following a partition with all the notes", instead that's a dialogue between all the musicians

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Post #4 Posted: Fri Oct 23, 2020 11:15 am 
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First question: One thing that children can aquire earlier which might help them with musicality is relative pitch (or they can even sustain absolute pitch). There is a study which shows that babys can remember music played to them before their birth, to the degree that they can even recognise changed notes afterwards (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/artic ... ne.0078946).

As a fun fact on the side: The "skill level: asian"-meme has actually some basis in the real world when it comes to relative/absolute pitch (and maybe therfore musicality?). Studies show that speakers of tone languages (such as Mandarin, Cantonese, and Vietnamese) possess absolute pitch to a much high degree (http://deutsch.ucsd.edu/psychology/pages.php?i=215). Another side note: With learning an instrument at a young age there is also less risk of your kid choking to death.

Back to seriousness: Go has an aweful feedback loop which makes learning it harder than learning an instrument. Assuming that you're less tone-deaf than I am, you will hear yourself play a note wrong - instantly. On the other hand look at DDK-games. With 30 minutes main time each. And nobody knows what anybody did wrong besides those captured stones on move 250 because one player missed a liberty shortage.

Another important learning technique is compartmentalisation. You focus your practice on specific parts of the skill instead of doing everything at once. Musicians will practice the difficult part of a piece over and over again. Musicians will go through scales over and over again to build up "muscle memory". How to achieve that in go? Solving locally isolated situations is nice but just compared to the stuff musicians do it is highly inefficient. When you practice scales or a difficult part you still hear your perfomance, it still has to sound right. You are - in a sense - still connected to everything your instrument and music is. Solving locally isolated situations has much less to do with playing a real go game. With the whole board to play on, killing a group or getting a ko might be the wrong move. As might be living in gote (or living at all). Don't get me started on opening patterns with a "locally even result" or calculating fractions in the endgame.

To go on another short tangent: Nowadays I believe that - after you got your first hunch of the basics at around strong SDK - the best way to efficently study go is to go over professional games. A lot of them. Constantly. Make your unconsciousness work for you and remember that pro players don't necessarily read deeper than you, they just choose better starting moves and don't read obvious bad sequences ; )

Just to make it clear: Solving locally isolated situations will make you a better go player over time. But investing the same time in learning an instrument yields a higher ROI in my opinion.

Second question: No input.

Third question: Teaching has most certainly evolved for the better. Well, ...let's say there are now much better teaching methods available because there is more knowledge into the science stuff behind it. Whether or not you or your teacher follow those methods is another question.

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Post #5 Posted: Sat Oct 24, 2020 1:55 am 
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I found all the replies thought-provoking and eye-opening, thank you, but one thing really caught (copped:)) by attention. That was the concept of feedback brought up mu SoDesunNe.

It was not only a very good point in this context, but is, I think, a concept that is sorely neglected in go, and really is the sort of thing a forum like this should be discussing.

However, it resonated with me especially because of something I happened to be thinking about yesterday. From Japanese go we have something of an idée fixe of an ideal environment for learning to be a pro: be a live-in pupil in the school of a good and kindly pro teacher where you have intense competition from peers on the same career path. At one time it was even normal for Koreans to aspire to sending their children to such Japanese schools.

Later Koreans and then the Chinese showed that this did not have to be the only model, but even so their new models still incorporated intense competition and a supervising teacher, and sometimes even the live-in aspect.

But it occurred to me last night when thinking about a commentary by an ancient Chinese master on the even more ancient Huang Longshi. Huang is acknowledged to be at genius level (or sage as the ancient used to say), but he can make horrendous mistakes at times. In this case Wu Xiupu was harping on about Huang making slow moves in the opening, missing the big points and key points. Even to an amateur it was obvious he was right. But I had grave reservations about labelling these moves just as mistakes. For one thing Huang almost never makes this kind of mistake in other games. For another, you see him elsewhere experimenting with one-off or two-off examples of an unusual style of play, for example a large moyo strategy. Again what shines through when he does this is that he is consistent.

When I got to wondering why he was doing this, the most obvious point to me was that he had no other way to learn. No other way to get feedback. Even tournaments were rare. The old Chinese masters essentially grew up, in go terms, in solitary confinement with occasional day-release arrangements to play another master for high stakes. Which meant (I postulated) that people like Huang had to create their own feedback loops. So, the big question is: how did they do that?

After Huang's time go clubs (of a sort) developed, and there were masters like Xu Xingyou and Shi Dingan who were willing to play upcoming stars for small or maybe zero stakes, but there was still nothing we could label as a school system. And the nearest thing to a teacher was a master (such as Xu Xingyou) willing and able to write penetrating commentaries (something the Japanese lacked, incidentally; and even before commentaries the old Chinese had very extensive joseki manuals). Indeed, we can even make a case that the number of high-level masters in old China was far higher than in old Japan.

So, yet again: how did they do it? How did they create their own feedback?

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Post #6 Posted: Sat Oct 24, 2020 8:59 am 
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Good question. As the ultimate feedback, they still lose, I guess.

It helps figuring out why you lost. If you don't know, search for situations where you felt outplayed and think about why you played as you did (strategy) then come up with a different strategy. Don't just change moves, know why you chose the move you played and change/adapt your thinking. Moves are plentiful in a go game and thus tend to be more meaningless, it's like memorising "correct" moves in a joseki. You now know a locally good move (until bots beg to differ) but you know nothing about a go as a whole board game. Strategies are more universally applicable, they (should) factor in the whole board. Then play the next game, try to remember your analysis and repeat. If you want to be on the top, do the same with every won game as well.

This feedback is rarely immediate and thus more inefficient according to learning theory but it gets the job done.

Even worse - according to learning theory - is going over master games. There is no feedback per se because you are not actively participating. I guess you can set up a feedback loop by trying to assess where the next move will be played and why - but how and what did you learn when you were wrong? Can you extract a strategy from one move? Can you understand the master player's intention by comparing your thought process behind your move and the move, which was actually played? Can you grasp whether both moves were actually equally good or just a matter of style? If you can't say yes to these questions with (a little bit of) confidence, I think you shouldn't do this excercise.

Then again, I believe going over master games is very good for your go. Not on a move-by-move level though. For me it's more about ideas, concepts, handling of groups, direction and so on. Look for tenukis, notice the struggle for initiative, recognise sacrifices and trades, be mindful of fights and how, when, from where and to where they flow... and be alert to when they stop. That's all (ideas of) strategy you can incorporate in your game to get feedback on. And now be playful!

PS: Magnus Carlsen is said to have played a lot of games against himself when he was young. Deliberately manufacturing situations where he could practice what he learnt. Maybe that's a way to go. Though go has more moves than chess on average and due to the nature of pieces and their utilisation, moves in chess feel more important than in go.

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Post #7 Posted: Sat Oct 24, 2020 9:49 am 
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SoDesuNe wrote:
Even worse - according to learning theory - is going over master games. There is no feedback per se because you are not actively participating.


That depends upon you learning theory. :) By some time in the 1980s imitation theory, i.e., learning by observation, had made a comeback. :)

Quote:
I guess you can set up a feedback loop by trying to assess where the next move will be played


You used to could use the GoGoD95 software to do that. Still can, John?

Quote:
PS: Magnus Carlsen is said to have played a lot of games against himself when he was young. Deliberately manufacturing situations where he could practice what he learnt. Maybe that's a way to go. Though go has more moves than chess on average and due to the nature of pieces and their utilisation, moves in chess feel more important than in go.


Playing around with positions is, IMO, a good idea at all levels of play. :)

Nigel Davies wrote:
It really doesn’t matter what you study, the important thing is to use this as a training ground for thinking rather than trying to assimilate a mind-numbing amount of information. In these days of a zillion different chess products this message seems to be quite lost, and indeed most people seem to want books that tell them what to do. The reality is that you’ve got to move the pieces around the board and play with the position. Who does that? Amateurs don’t, GMs do.

(Emphasis mine) From http://rlpchessblog.blogspot.com/2011/0 ... rtesy.html

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Post #8 Posted: Sat Oct 24, 2020 4:48 pm 
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John Fairbairn wrote:

Natsuho blew me away but I'm a weak amateur. It was fascinating to hear a member of the jury congratulate her after she played Vivaldi's "Winter". First he commended her for not playing in the standard way of people like Oistrakh: she, unusually, brought a touch of joy to her interpretation of winter. He added that, for that reason, if he heard a recording of her playing that music in 20 years time, he would know instantly it was her. Then he remarked that she had brought her own dynamics dynamic and ornamentation to the music that were not printed on the page. To me, that's very high praise. But I did wonder whether it was a subtle and polite and so gentle form criticism (because she went off-script). Is that plausible?


In Baroque music the ornaments were often improvised during the performance. They should be done in the proper style, something that was not generally well understood until the last quarter of the 20th century. Doing your own ornaments in appropriate style would indicate a high level of musicianship.

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Post #9 Posted: Sun Oct 25, 2020 3:57 am 
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Bill Spight wrote:
SoDesuNe wrote:
Even worse - according to learning theory - is going over master games. There is no feedback per se because you are not actively participating.


That depends upon you learning theory. :) By some time in the 1980s imitation theory, i.e., learning by observation, had made a comeback. :)


Since a couple of years, I try to stick to K. Anders Ericsson's body of work. A good overview: https://hbr.org/2007/07/the-making-of-an-expert

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Post #10 Posted: Sun Oct 25, 2020 5:43 am 
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SoDesuNe wrote:
Bill Spight wrote:
SoDesuNe wrote:
Even worse - according to learning theory - is going over master games. There is no feedback per se because you are not actively participating.


That depends upon you learning theory. :) By some time in the 1980s imitation theory, i.e., learning by observation, had made a comeback. :)


Since a couple of years, I try to stick to K. Anders Ericsson's body of work. A good overview: https://hbr.org/2007/07/the-making-of-an-expert


Thanks for the reference. :)

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Post #11 Posted: Sun Oct 25, 2020 5:46 am 
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Thanks for this link. I have tried to read some of Ericsson's more technical work, but my attention span wasn't up to the task. In this article, I especially like this...

"It’s very easy to neglect deliberate practice. Experts who reach a high level of performance often find themselves responding automatically to specific situations and may come to rely exclusively on their intuition. This leads to difficulties when they deal with atypical or rare cases, because they’ve lost the ability to analyze a situation and work through the right response...

... As the golf champion Sam Snead once put it, “It is only human nature to want to practice what you can already do well, since it’s a hell of a lot less work and a hell of a lot more fun.”"

It resonates with the way I play Go these days.
:grumpy:

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Post #12 Posted: Sun Oct 25, 2020 6:23 am 
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SoDesuNe wrote:
Go has an aweful feedback loop which makes learning it harder than learning an instrument. Assuming that you're less tone-deaf than I am, you will hear yourself play a note wrong - instantly


Hearing that something is wrong is immediate, but when you play 12 notes/second, hearing what is wrong is more difficult. Which note exactly was played to early or too late? Which note was too loud or not loud enough?

IMO, music and go require many common skills like: ability to analyze mistakes, willingness to correct bad habits, patience, perfectionism,... The main difference is the role of emotions. The very purpose of music is to communicate emotions, so when practising music you need to feel what the music expresses, but your analytical mind has to stay active and be aware of how you are playing and how this can be improved. Go doesn't need emotions since AIs can play it , but a game between humans can also be a psychological battle, however emotions are viewed as rather negative, as something that you should control and prevent from offsetting your analytical mind.

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Post #13 Posted: Sun Oct 25, 2020 8:06 am 
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ericsson wrote:
It’s very easy to neglect deliberate practice. Experts who reach a high level of performance often find themselves responding automatically to specific situations and may come to rely exclusively on their intuition. This leads to difficulties when they deal with atypical or rare cases, because they’ve lost the ability to analyze a situation and work through the right response...

... As the golf champion Sam Snead once put it, “It is only human nature to want to practice what you can already do well, since it’s a hell of a lot less work and a hell of a lot more fun.”


Sam Snead shot his age on 18 holes when he was 59, the slacker. :lol:

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Post #14 Posted: Sun Oct 25, 2020 8:43 am 
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I enjoyed the link. I've read some of this sort of stuff before, but only the dumbed down version by mon-experts you get at airports. This Ericsson piece was dumbed down a bit but was by THE expert and answered almost all my previously unanswered questions.

One question he didn't answer completely (and why should he, when he didn't even know the question!) was how much effect it has when one of the necessary elements is missing.

I'm thinking specifically of the lack of a teacher. Neither Huang Longshi nor Go Seigen had a teacher. I'm not entirely sure it's fair to say Dosaku had a teacher, although formally Doetsu ticked that box, because Dosaku was on a different level. As Segoe was for Go, Doetsu was really just a guardian and a mentor, not a teacher or a coach.

So, three teacherless geniuses, and we could easily extend that list if we demand strict criteria for what constitutes a teacher (e.g. Shusaku was 1-dan pro level at age 10 before he joined the Honinbo scbool).

In the cases of Huang and Go we can't even say they had intense competition, as they were not part of a peer group. The only things we can say about them unequivocally is that started very young and clearly put in their 10,000+ hours.

Yet, despite the lack of a human teacher, I'm still inclined to speculate (and I stress the 'speculate') that they had an inanimate one. Go's favourite book was the Yi Jing (aka I Ching) or Book of Changes. It began life over two millennia ago as a fortune-telling book, and can still be found used that way in oriental shopping malls. But for Chinese gentlemen it was mainly a tool for stimulating thoughts. By picking a concept at random and then tagging on associated thoughts also at random, you end up with a nexus of thoughts that can be applied to any event. Apart from the fact that the main thought and its associations form a consistent whole, the main point is that you are supplied with a thought pattern you wouldn't have come up with yourself. It's new, it's interesting, it's motivating, it's feedback. This thought system would have been familiar to Huang, too, I'm certain, and we do know that he relied for thoughts an another ancient classic, the Art of War.

While again stressing that this is speculative, I think it marries well with what Ericsson said about Benjamin Franklin and also about elite performers having the confidence to ignore their coaches and decide what is best for themselves.

Incidentally, I have tried the Yi Jing method for myself, and it is certainly eye-opening and useful at my level. The problem for me is that I haven't found the hexagram that stops me being lazy.

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