Technique in a Deterministic Universe

Determinism and technique

Last week I wrote an introduction blog and a brief idea of the forces at play in singing and the general idea of teaching. Today, I want to dig in much more and begin a series of posts on determinism in the studio. This first post is a consideration of what technique is in a deterministic universe, then a post on what a singer’s job is in such a universe, one on what a teacher’s is, and finally a try to square our circle with a post on teaching ideas and techniques we might employ. I hope you enjoy these and I would love to hear your feedback.

First, what is Determinism:

Determinism is a fairly straightforward concept. Things continue on as they were. Each moment must follow the next in a direct flow. You confidently believe in this idea! However you are reading this, you are sure of the following:

• The device you are reading on will not suddenly turn into a bird.

• Your fingers will remain attached to your hand.

• The Earth will not stop spinning.

Our basic idea of life, and how we successfully navigate our universe, counts on this idea. We have no scientific evidence for any event in our universe, except for some things at the quantum level, as being non-deterministic. For reference, here is a definition from the Cambridge Dictionary: the theory that everything that happens must happen as it does and could not have happened any other way.

Uh oh…

I think most people are pretty happy at this point. But here is a definition from Britannica: Determinism, in philosophy and science, the thesis that all events in the universe, including human decisions and actions, are causally inevitable.

This, on the other hand, causes major problems! That little phrase which I bolded as, “including human decisions and actions,” is a whopper. Very few people accept this. Almost everyone believes that we are in charge of our thoughts, decisions, and actions. Our entire worldview, be it good and evil, heroism and villainy, or talent and failure, is drawn from this concept.

An example:

For what we are exploring, there is no evidence in human history of a receptor, a neuron, a motor neuron, or a muscle doing something different than what it was primed to do. Let me explain that in more detail. We could choose any part of this sequence, but we will just use the neuron.

A neuron lives its life waiting to be fired. It has a potential amount of energy stored up. When it receives its cue, that energy travels down the length of the neuron and passes off into the space between it and the next neuron. It has no ability to choose. It can only do what it does.

There are wildly complex variables that might cause the neuron following it to fire or not. Various neural chemicals might have been released, blunting the power of the signal. Other neurons might be firing to drown out its power. Hormones might be floating around the body that increase or decrease the signal. But none of those elements, no matter how complex they are, change the outcome. All of those elements are either present or not, and the neuron can not control their presence, or over rule them. The only thing the neuron could have done, it does. Everything, no matter how complex or how far back you go in the chain, is doing exactly what it was primed to do.

Zoom out a bit

Ok, so let’s follow the chain of singing. Something signals you to sing. It’s a musical cue that hits your ears, starting the chain of reactions. It’s a rhythmic count you are keeping in

your brain, starting the chain. It’s a visual cue from a teacher or conductor, starting the chain. Then you sing. Easy, right?

Importantly, in the situation that you were in, you could not have chosen not to sing. The potential action in all the neurons was already there. The cue was there. The neural pathways and neural chemicals were there. There is no place in the system for any receptor or neuron to not “start the chain.” You didn’t choose to choose to sing, you reacted to a condition you were in.

You might say, “but I do choose!” The reality is that, given the inputs—action potentials in the neurons, your present state, your history of singing, etc.—the initiation was inevitable. That does not mean you could not do something different in the future, but right then, at that exact moment, you only could have sung.

Now the signal is heading into your brain, firing the wonderful, incomprehensible, complex of neural pathways that coordinate your singing. These pathways are multifaceted, branching into numerous areas of your brain, including the sensorimotor cortex, the premotor areas, the cerebellum, the motor cortex. It then heads on down to the various muscles involved through numerous neurons, and ends up firing muscles. Amazing!

All the while, nothing has happened that could not have happened. Even as you were gathering more information along the way—about the state of your instrument, the state of the universe around you, the feel of your body in space—at no point did something happen that could have been done differently.

Consider your thoughts

At this point, people tend to get frustrated or incredulous. “As I was singing, I was thinking about things. Those things affected my singing!”

Well, yes and no. You were becoming aware of thoughts that were arising from this chain. Perhaps you have learned over time that if you think about technical things while you sing, you get a different result. That, in turn, teaches you to think about technical things while you sing in the future. But that doesn’t mean you could have “not” thought about them, or had different ideas arise in your mind! Those things were the only thoughts that could have occurred, and the reactions they created in your chain were the only reactions they could have.

Consider the environment

So if we take all this together, we need to then consider some important elements. Your technique, if we consider the standard definition of technique to be your ability to sing well, is not a single thing that you repeat, but rather a fluid and dynamic reaction tuned by your training to respond to many inputs. Things like the state of your body, the state of your emotions, your hormones, previous experiences, preconceptions about the audience, and the feedback you are receiving from the acoustical environment all have distinct

ChatGPT made the dude balding. Et tu, ChatGPT?

impacts on your performance. Some of that “community response” is immediate (faces, energy, applause timing) and some is delayed (notes, reviews); the instant feedback belongs to the now and changes then”technique” you are about to sing with, while the delayed feedback reshapes the a more future technique. But, in fact, your technique is different, and uses different neural pathways, each time you sing. In a deterministic framing, your phonation at any given moment is a function of your current state and the inputs being received. You can’t change now, but you can change your current state for the next now. By “state,” I mean the stuff training actually changes—priors and thresholds, reflex couplings, timing, even myelination—so the next time similar cues arrive, the system routes differently. That’s training.

So why bother with lessons?

So now we are at a crossroads. What is the point of lessons if the resultant phonation is the only sound we could have made? Here is the most important part: Each time you phonate, you learn something about your response in that given moment. You can then, in turn, iterate and prime for a better future result. Just because you can’t make a different sound than the one you were destined for in that moment doesn’t mean that is the sound you are destined to create forever. In fact, the very opposite. In a deterministic frame, the present sound is just state + inputs. Lessons don’t change this instant; they change the state you carry into the next one. That’s why training matters: it rewrites what your system is likely to do when the same cues show up again.

So what is technique?

Consider what you probably were taught as the definition of technique. Consider the way we often say it, or the way a teacher often presents it to students. That person has good technique because they have some element of singing: good posture, good breath control, an open throat, a relaxed jaw. In fairness, those can be core elements of creating the desired sound. But all of these are things a singer does in the moment, or things they are feeling in the moment. (They are also Western Canon–based, but we can put that aside for now.) They are things you, the singer, are applying now. In order to create those attributes, the singer is probably utilizing multiple neural pathways. But you, the singer, can’t change now, it’s done! You can only create the one thing you were capable of right now. It’s the future you can change. So “good technique” isn’t a fixed checklist applied in the moment; it’s the trained, context-sensitive repository of reactions that yield the desired sound reliably across environments. In other words, that repository functions as an adaptive policy or repertoire—a context-sensitive mapping you’ve trained, not a fixed bag of tricks.

An example:

I frequently have wonderfully disciplined, motivated young students that enter my studio who are aiming for the wrong target. These students, typically achievers with strong mental aptitudes, are conceiving of technique as a thing they are controlling at that moment. They are trying to open their jaw, or lift their palate, or stand with tall posture, or any number of ideas. And they are trying to do it right now, and they are judging success based on whether or not they can do that thing as intensely as possible at that exact moment. But that isn’t technique. We have to work to reframe them to experience the

nature of the singing as a responder, and to soften the idea that technique is the same in all contexts. In doing so, they will often find that singing is much more enjoyable and they are far more skillful than they had realized. And their goal is to see if they can bring that enjoyment to more environments, and allow themselves to discover the joy of their body’s response to music.

Elements of singing technique in a deterministic framework:

• The ability to develop skills that are applied inside multiple environments.

• Robustness of growth in varied skills on different days.

• The ability to artistically validate your singing with the framework of your personal artistic goals after each phonation.

That’s why snapshot checklists mislead: they describe how a singer looks in one instant, not the trained, context-sensitive mapping that actually produces reliable sound across changing environments.

TL;DR

Good technique isn’t a momentary checklist; it’s the trained, context-sensitive policy that reproduces your target sound across changing environments.

A more deterministic definition:

Technique is reliable predetermined stimulus-to-sound mapping in environmental contexts—the learned coordination that exploits and compensates for your emotional, physical, and hormonal state while continuously referencing room feedback and community response in order to consistently facilitate the phonation the artist desires. Next time I will use this model to examing a singer's responsibility when trying to get more skilled at singing.