My downtime app of choice, lately, is a corner of the Lichess app devoted to chess puzzles. They take a minute or so to solve a puzzle, and it gives a good mini-brain break from concentration-intense projects. It also helps me keep up with my kids, who keep proving themselves better than me at chess.
One of the things I love about chess puzzles is how I learn context without being “taught.” I am simply given puzzle after puzzle, and fail to take the best move over and over again, until I start to recognize certain patterns. Suddenly I can see why the Bishop is a better move than the Knight, or why I should sacrifice my Queen in a given situation.
I’m not studying the patterns – I’m just playing these puzzles – but over time I’m developing a sort of involuntary pattern recognition.
I think the same is true of music – we can learn skills and concepts, develop literacy and techniques, and that’s all important and wonderful. But we also learn by doing, over and over, until we recognize the musical patterns without being able to know exactly how we learned to recognize them.
We learn by doing – by interacting with lots of music, by performing as often as possible, by listening voraciously. Eventually, all of that experience does to our musical brains what the puzzles do to my chess brain – train it to have better instincts.