Learning to read music in Braille and play by ear helped me develop a damn good memory.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I learned when I started to study piano that I could play by ear. I could hear a song on the radio a couple of times and hear the song and the lyrics and sing it for you after a couple of plays.
When I was 13, I started working in a nightclub with Ray Charles. That's the greatest school in the world, the school of the streets. Ray taught me how to read in Braille. He was only two years older than me, but it was like he was 100 years older.
My mother knew how to read music and everything. But I just kinda learned off of records. And so, I was listening to records and I'd play 'em over and over.
I could read music before I could read.
Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory.
From the time I could play the piano, I remember trying to write tunes. They were in my head, and I would just sit down and start noodling. Next thing I knew, I had written a melody.
The process of learning requires not only hearing and applying but also forgetting and then remembering again.
I met with amnesiacs and savants, educators and scientists, to try to understand what memory is, why it works, why it sometimes doesn't, and what its potential might be.
I have dyslexia, and I never did learn to read music, and I even had a problem in reading because everything was turned upside down, so I just had to draw from the lyrics and the voice that I would hear in my mind.
I used to play the piano by listening to it - like Chopin pieces, when I was, like, a little kid - and then the minute my parents got me lessons to read music, I couldn't do it anymore.