Posted by fuzzythinker 1 day ago
Mozart only wrote like 20 piano sonatas and about the same number of violin sonatas. It's no exaggeration to say that most concert pianists or violinists probably know at least 5 of them just as a matter of course because they will have learned them at some point in their musical education and someone who specialised in the classical period would probably know all of them. My wife learns tons of repertoire when she's performing as most of her concerts are completely from memory and this includes a vast range of repertoire from the middle ages through very complex 20th/21st century music.
Conductors often memorize monumental works as part of their preparation. Eg Zubin Mehta conducting Bruckner's 8th from memory age 89. That's a way way bigger piece of music than a Mozart sonata - super long and with massive forces. https://parsikhabar.net/music/zubin-mehta-at-89-still-comman...
This is the same as how chess grandmasters know literally hundreds or possibly thousands of games. Extreme example: David Howell tests Magnus Carlsen https://youtu.be/eC1BAcOzHyY?si=I-xJEo4NQUkLPDQ0
...or jazz musicians know hundreds or possibly thousands of standards.
You kind of have to know these things to perform. That being said with memorizing music you have a lot of structure that makes it easier whereas memorizing digits of pi or e you are learning a transcendental number so it may as well be random. You have to impose whatever structure you can, which must surely make it harder.
The trick is to embrace incredulity. The more bizarre and strange the “tags” you assign to what you remember, the easier they stick in your head. It feels daft and cringeworthy, but it really, really works.
For this, however, I’d argue a memory palace is overkill. And I still don’t know how well it lends itself to remembering numbers by rote.
Consider this: how many telephone numbers have you memorised?
I can recall four of my own, each of my parents, my wife, and a handful of home phone numbers too.
That’s easily 100 digits in a specific order. Perhaps it’s possible to chunk the 100 digits of pie into smaller pieces, and memorise them like phrases, just as we do with phone numbers.
Having not practiced at all since about 2001 or so, I can still get to about 30 pretty easily. I didn't use any techniques specifically, I just kept practicing as far as I remember.
Trying to remember 100 digits of pi won't give you any advantage in cognitive functions apart from memorizing 100 digits of pi, for a little while. Better spend your time elsewhere.
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/how-many-decimals-of-pi-do...
Then, like a MENTAT, they'd be able to tell you the 16afedf97fd4th digit of pi when prod
In hex, naturally https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailey%E2%80%93Borwein%E2%80%9...
>The BBP formula gives rise to a spigot algorithm for computing the nth base-16 (hexadecimal) digit of π (and therefore also the 4nth binary digit of π) WITHOUT computing the preceding digits.