When you think of coding, you think of all sorts of words and abbreviations and symbols combined together to get “something” done. For example, you might look at something like:
i = 0 while i != 15 something.each do { |games| games.all « new_stuff[i] if new_stuff[i].even? } i += 1 end
When you look at that, unless you know the coding language, it looks a bit like gibberish. And that’s totally true! What you start to realize is that coding is a language. Just like learning French or Mandarin, you need to take the time to learn what the pieces of the language do. Fortunately for us, this kind of code uses letters and symbols we are familiar with recognizing.
But hang on, where does the “Music” portion of this all come in?
Music is a symbols based language as well. Many people in my cohort, including some teachers, have asked me what it is like to be learning code as a musician. And honestly, I think it has helped me extensively. With music, there are dots on a page on some lines and you have to determine what that means and translate it to your hands. If you’re singing, then you have to translate it to certain form in your vocal chords and then say some words that are not associated with the musical symbol! That’s a ton to think about as you break it down. No wonder people say things like, “Man, I could never play an instrument,” or, “Music is just hard for me.”
That’s because music is a completely new language.
Allow me to share with you one of my favorite quotes:
“Being great means being bad for a little while”
That’s from a Rosetta Stone commercial. Yeah, a commercial, but it’s incredibly important to know while you are learning anything new.
You have to give yourself a chance to suck at it first before you can do well. I’m sure if you ask any coder, including those that we would consider Big Wigs, they would tell you that they really stank at coding when they first started out. Just like if you were to ask me how I was when I first started music, I was brutally bad. My mom once told me, “That’s enough practicing for today!” due to my awful sound.
The message that I’m trying to say is not that music necessarily helps me code since it works some side of my brain or matches my brain to symbol recognition (which maybe it does…but not enough to stand out). Instead, I’m trying to say that music taught me the patience of learning a language. The patience to respect myself enough to know that I’m probably going to forget a piece here and there and need to work harder and harder every day to make myself better. It taught me not to look at myself in the moment, but compare it to where I was in the past. A month ago, I could barely use the map and each functions, but now they are cake to me.
I’ll leave you with this:
Music is language.
Coding is language.
Be bad for a while, and then be great.