Taming Your Technology Habit

By Anne Sullivan

You have a smartphone, right? Good for you. As technology becomes ever smarter, musicians know their smartphones are powerful tools to help them be better musicians.

The voice recorder and the video recorder are essential. 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.

Let’s not forget the apps. You can digitize, read, store and catalog your sheet music. You can leave those extra tuners and metronomes in their boxes, because they are all on your phone. 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. 

And then there’s the web browser, your ticket to an unlimited amount of information. Whether you love YouTube or Wikipedia or Instagram or TikTok 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. How awesome is that?

Here’s what’s not so awesome: as long ago as 2019, reports revealed that American teenagers spend about 7 hours and 22 minutes each day on their cell phones. That’s scary. That’s nearly a third of each and every day.

So what should you do? If your phone is useful to you in your practice, you don’t want to leave it outside your practice room. On the other hand, having it in the room makes it way too easy to take a quick look at social media. I have a few suggestions that may help you tame your technology habit.

1. Go “old school.” Unless you know you’re going to need that app, leave your phone outside your practice room. Keep a separate tuner and metronome for your practice at home and just use your phone apps when you’re on the go.
2. Take an old phone that no one in your family uses any more and put only your music apps on that phone. Then you have a dedicated device that can’t distract you.
3. Use “Do Not Disturb” mode while you’re practicing. If your phone makes noise while you’re working, it’s tempting to check to see what came in. The texts and chats and posts can wait until you’re free. Really.

Here’s one more tip about the phone feature we sometimes forget: your phone has an “off” button. Use it!