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Songwriting
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Joined: Apr 2009
Posts: 10,906
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Joined: Apr 2009
Posts: 10,906 |
Not , do you still write songs and lyrics. I'm assuming most people here, do. What this is asking about is more of the "how do you write" as opposed to what seems to be the obvious answer.
Do you type it out or do you still use a pad and pencil or pen to write out the lyrics?
For decades I used a pad and pencil. When I got Band in a Box I started using the built in document feature. It was easier to enter, edit and work on the lyrics.
Anyway.... In one of my HRD dog topic Facebook groups I came across this article.
It's certainly food for thought as it's the flip side of the same coin since I have heard the same thing about music from the point of actually playing an instrument vs just editing music in our computers.
Heres the article:
A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.
Her name is Audrey van der Meer.
She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.
The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.
Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.
Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.
When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.
The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.
When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.
Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.
Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events.
The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.
Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.
Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.
Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.
Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.
Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.
A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.
The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.
The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.
The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.
That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.
Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.
Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.
Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.
You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.
The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.
Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.
You can find my music at: www.herbhartley.comAdd nothing that adds nothing to the music. You can make excuses or you can make progress but not both. The magic you are looking for is in the work you are avoiding.
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Songwriting
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Joined: Mar 2025
Posts: 1,205
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Expert
Joined: Mar 2025
Posts: 1,205 |
Hi Herb!
I type lyrics and chords straight into a Word document nowadays, and usually into BIAB at the same time. This is purely for expediency and storage. But, I like handwriting better. When I used to write songs by hand, I would write the lyrics with chords above, and often drew a stave and wrote the notation for the melody as well, so if I ever came back to it, the notation would jog my memory.
Interesting research. I have to admit there feels something more wholesome about handwriting - maybe it’s the brain workout?
I also have a favourite brand of pen - Uni-ball UB-157 Eye Fine Point Roller blue - using it gives me an enormous sense of well-being!
Andrew
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Songwriting
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Joined: Sep 2010
Posts: 8,254
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Veteran
Joined: Sep 2010
Posts: 8,254 |
It seems these two studies are looking at different things.
The first study notes that there is a physicality that is required to internalize letters shapes based on a different study. What that first study seems to show is how inefficient writing is - it requires massive mental work on the part of university students, who (hopefully) are not struggling to tell an 'a' from a 'b'.
In the second study, I suspect that the students who were typing were focused on their perceived task - transcribing the lecture, rather than learning it. But I agree that simply writing the words is a different activity.
On the other hand, writing lyrics is a different activity than listening to a lecture. I'm not sure how much it relates to handwriting. I find it much more efficient to move words and rewrite using a keyboard than handwritten notes, which quickly become a mess.
But whatever works for folk.
-- David Cuny My virtual singer development blogVocal control, you say. Never heard of it. Is that some kind of ProTools thing?BiaB 2025 | Windows 11 | Reaper | Way too many VSTis.
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Songwriting
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Joined: Oct 2025
Posts: 4
Newbie
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Newbie
Joined: Oct 2025
Posts: 4 |
For the reason that David pointed out, I type out my lyrics in Excel as my mind is too jumbled when I'm coming up with lyrics. Writing it down on paper just gets too messy.
With Excel, I tend to have a list of ideas or lines in a right-hand column that I'll move around and try to fit into the main body of lyrics that I'm assembling in a left-hand column. I find it easier to do that in Excel than in a Word document.
Now, when I'm free-writing to get some ideas for a song, I might write out some ideas with pen and paper, but I'll also do that on the computer; whatever I have closest to me at the time.
Also, when I'm learning a cover song, I'll write out the lyrics by hand as I've found it helps me learn the lyrics more quickly.
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