Every concert, every performance is a spontaneous act.
Sufficient stability. Enough flexibility. A game with gravity and acoustics.
Every time you go on stage, you recreate your sound.
You do not present a written book or a finished recording.
It is a living body that recreates from scratch what you have already learned, played or sung many times.
Many musicians long for precision: that day when every note aligns, breath flows and resonance feels effortless.
But the brain that actually sings or plays with precision is not the one that controls sound and movement.
It’s the one that creates. Of course, precision and creativity are not separate functions of the brain 😅 – they are intertwined expressions of how the nervous system balances stability and flexibility.
And when I speak of the brain, I also speak of sensitivity to emotions, because they are part of the sensitivity to precision.
The closed loop of repetition
So often we seek to reproduce the sound that once worked.
A vowel sounded rounder, the tone shone – and we want to ensure that result.
Then we repeat it again and again, convinced that consistency comes from control.
But repetition without recreation locks the brain into a closed loop.
Neural activity circulates along the same limited pathways, generating fewer sensory updates.
The system stops receiving enough information to reorganize itself – and learning silently stops.
What was alive before becomes mechanical.
And the next day, when the voice feels different, we no longer find that sound,
because the brain had no open ends for new connections.
When we talk about precision in singing and in music in general, we usually think of:
- discipline in the practice room
- accurately executed movements
- replay
- optimal resonance
- routines that worked for other musicians
- maintaining a “positive” attitude, avoiding stress and negative emotions
We rarely think about the limitations of this mentality.
And this can keep us spinning in a closed circle, with little possibility of growth,
because all these strategies aim more at stability than flexibility.
To grow, you need open ends – room for new possibilities.
We practice resonance strategies, trying to repeat many times the successful sound we just found, to make sure it will work tomorrow.
But when tomorrow comes and we don’t find it, we get frustrated.
We no longer find it because the link is missing, the awareness of a bigger, more colorful picture – there is no room for novelty or reorganization.
Accuracy requires variability
From a neuroscientific point of view, musical precision is not the absence of error,
but the ability to adapt.
Each moment of singing or performing creates a network of small predictions in the brain:
how the sound will feel, how it will resonate, how the body will respond.
When these predictions do not match reality, the brain updates the model.
This refines coordination.
This means that variability is not a problem.
It is the stuff of precision.
Without micro-variations – of pitch, sensation, space or emotion – the brain cannot calibrate.
It needs those subtle differences to keep reorganizing itself.
“The” idealsound
Perhaps this explains why clinging to an ideal of sound that is too rigid can make our musical experience narrow and even uncomfortable.
What we are really looking for is not the right sound, but a spectrum of resonant sounds, of possible movements
and within that spectrum we find possibilities to create.
The living nature of resonance
Resonance is often treated as a place to be reached – a position of the bow, finger, lips, larynx or tongue.
But resonance is a moving relationship between body, instrument, sound and space.
It changes with air, temperature, emotions, hormonal cycle, spinal movement, age, colleagues co-creating music….
To try to “fix it” is to deny the intelligence of the system.
Violinist Thomas Lange, creator of Resonance Training – a movement approach for musicians – observes that sound is not a consequence of movement, but a phenomenon that arises along with it.
Through the vestibular and proprioceptive systems, the body continuously senses movement and balance, allowing for micro-regulation that is often outside of conscious control.
In singing, Cornelius Reid observed that the ear regulates vocal function – not in isolation, but as part of the brain’s multisensory feedback system.
In that sense, the ears can guide adaptation when we listen again each time.
Reid described the voice as a living process of self-organization.
Self-organization of the body does not exclude conscious intention: it means that body and brain can refine coordination spontaneously, through feedback, rather than through direct commands.
Precision, in that sense, is not fixed – it emerges from continuous interaction.
When instrumentalists or singers become attuned to this dialogue, their coordination becomes both precise and fluid.
Stability and flexibility are available.
This opens up possibilities for ways of learning and performing in accordance with the functioning of the brain,
not only for motor precision, but also for cultivating an artistic sensitivity to the sensations and emotions that make each piece of music unique.
The creative brain as a self-organizing system
A creative brain is one that can reorganize itself.
It maintains enough stability to know where it is,
and enough flexibility to move elsewhere.
In motor learning, this dynamic equilibrium is called self-organization.
This is how coordination evolves: through spontaneous micro-adjustments guided by feedback, not conscious control.
When musicians enter this space, they stop making precision and start allowing it.
The system itself becomes creative: it constantly senses, adjusts and refines.
Precision then emerges as a by-product of curiosity and a sensitive presence.
Practice for creativity and accuracy
To nurture an accurate and creative brain, maintain interest and curiosity:
- Vary, don’t repeat.
Play or sing the same phrase with different sounds, articulations, images, tempi or balance movements.
Repetition without variation does not stop learning – it narrows it.
The brain optimizes existing routes rather than exploring new ones. - Pause for awareness.
Between repetitions, listen to what changed – not only in sound, but in sensations and coordination. - Invite sensory novelty.
Change the environment, the focus (from a bar to a phrase, to the whole piece and back again) or the acoustic space.
Changing the movement generates new sensory information: let the nervous system find new routes of self-organization. - Rephrase the “errors”.
They are data: signals that the system is exploring its limits.
Make room for uncertainty.
Recreation, not repetition
Each sound you produce exists only once.
It is shaped by this breath, this posture, this movement, this moment.
The precision does not live in the past sound that you try to recover,
but in the living process of feeling, adjusting and recreating.
The accurate musical brain is creative – because it listens and senses what it does not yet know.
If you need new tools to gain stability and flexibility,
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