Are You Smarter Than Your Phone?

By Anne Sullivan 

I bet you have a smartphone.

It’s an easy guess. A 2021 survey reported that 91% of 14 year olds in the United States have a smartphone. I figure that applies to 14 year old harpists too.

So if you have a smartphone, you almost certainly know how helpful it can be for you with your harp playing. My smartphone replaces a bagful of equipment I used to have to carry around with me. There are so many cool things it can do, aside from being your “always handy” tuner or metronome.

The voice recorder or memo function and the video recorder are powerful tools for any musician. You can check your work as you practice or prepare for performances. You can send video or audio clips to a teacher for review, or to a friend who needs a little music to brighten their day. You can create and send audition recordings or save your favorite performances to share with your family.

The stopwatch and timer functions are useful for timing the length of pieces you want to add to a program, or timing your practice sessions. And of course, the alarm function can help you keep moving in your practice session so you don’t get bogged down on one piece and end up with no time to practice the others.

And then there’s the web browser, your key to an unlimited amount of information. Whether you love YouTube or Wikipedia or sheet music websites or just being able to learn more about the harp, anything you need to know is a couple of clicks away. 

Let’s not forget the apps. You can digitize, read, store and catalog your sheet music. There are apps to help you practice and learn theory and connect with other harpists. You can even have your app “play” a piece of music for you so you can hear what it sounds like before you buy it. Almost everything a musician could need is available in an app somewhere; the only thing left for you to do is to actually practice and play.

But, harpist, beware. Your smartphone has a dark side, too. It can be a sneak thief, stealing your time and your focus. Here’s what I mean.

Studies have shown that the average American teenager checks their phone nearly 200 times a day, or roughly every 5 minutes they are awake. When it comes to your harp playing, the issue isn’t really the time you spend on your phone, though. It’s the potential of your phone to distract you during your practice.

It’s hard to resist the ping of a notification from a text or social media. Even if your phone is silenced while you are practicing, it is likely to use some of your energy simply not to check it in between pieces. Plus, if you’re using your phone in your practice - as your metronome, for instance - your phone will tempt you to check out that text each time you pick it up to change the tempo.

As one friend of mine told me recently, “I love my practice app. But the problem is that I can pause it. So I can rest between pieces, pause the app and check Instagram. It’s hard to resist.”

So what should you do? It seems a shame to banish this powerful tool from our practice rooms, but its distraction power takes a lot of effort to resist. I don’t have a perfect solution to offer you, but I can share my own strategy.

Only very rarely do I take my cell phone into my practice room. I go “old school;” I use my older tuners and metronomes and keep a written practice journal rather than use a practice app. When I need one of the other functions of my smartphone like the stopwatch, I am very careful not to succumb to temptation to look at the latest post, text or update. My phone is on silent and all my notifications are turned off. Airplane mode and I are best buddies.

One easier solution is to have a dedicated music tablet which has no apps at all on it that aren’t music-related. That means no email, no social media, no games, no newsfeeds. Just a tuner, a metronome, a music-reading app, a practice app and the like. The fewer apps, the fewer distractions you will face.  

My best advice? Be aware of the danger and do your best to put that smartphone out of sight and reach. Even better – be smart about your smartphone and simply turn it off!