Practice Lab: Using NotebookLM to Analyze Violin Lessons and Practice Trends

I’ve been thinking a lot about how I can turn my violin lesson notes and transcripts of lesson recordings into a way to track my progress over time, set practice goals, and improve my ability to implement the strategies I learn in my lesson to my practice at home. If these notes and transcripts can help me identify exactly what and how to practice each week, my practice will become more efficient, I’ll make faster technical progress, and I’ll learn pieces more quickly.

I already have extensive notes, and a growing archive of lesson transcripts. Now, I am looking for the tool to synthesize the information in these transcripts into actionable practice plans. This is where I turned to NotebookLM in one of a series of experiments using AI in the music practice room. As a tool well suited to educational uses, I decided to try out the Google AI tool, starting by importing all my lesson transcripts and recent post-lesson notes into a notebook.

The tool I used: NotebookLM

NotebookLM is a powerful AI tool, based around the concept of notebooks, that can build reports, presentations, mind-maps and even generate study tools like flash cards based on a set of data that you supply to the AI. You can chat with the tool to summarize and gain further insights into the dataset and save responses as notes inside the notebook. For a musician, this means turning all your practice notes and lesson transcripts into an evolving, searchable practice system that can help you identify what and how to practice and to grow as a musician.

NotebookLM core capabilities for music students include:

• Generate lesson summaries from transcripts
• Identify patterns across lessons
• Generate study tools like flashcards and mind-maps

What worked

The tool is able to summarize lesson transcripts and identify recurring technical challenges across lessons like intonation and shifting challenges. After creating a notebook in the tool and uploading all my notes and transcripts, I was interested to see how intonation in chromatic passages in Ysaye’s Sonata No. 4 came up in multiple lessons. It was easy to see all the direct practice strategies my teacher provided me across lessons to improve my intonation in these passages.

In addition to being a useful way to gain further insights into my violin lessons, the tool also a great way to keep a repository of transcripts and log repertoire I have learned over time. I liked the quick summaries that were auto-generated for each of my uploaded transcripts.

I was particularly interested in the mind-map functionality. It worked relatively well to outline the technical work I’ve done on Ysaye Sonata No. 4 including practice strategies that I can apply to future work as well.

What didn’t work

I found that the tool was limited by the accuracy of the notes I uploaded into the notebook. My notes and transcripts don’t always explicitly state the movement of the piece I am studying which caused the tool to sometimes misattribute technical work done in lessons to the wrong movement of the piece.

The tool looks to be built to generate relatively technical outputs when using the built-in prompts, for example in the “generate report” feature. While I found the options in this feature to be interesting, the output was overly technical.

Improvements

With some refinement of inputs and prompting, NotebookLM is a powerful tool to track and gain deeper insight into violin lessons and to use these insights to inform practice strategies for musical growth. Some improvements that to make as I continue to use this tool are:

• Label pieces and movements consistently in transcript and notes metadata for more accurate analysis within NotebookLM
• Refine prompts for generating reports for more musically relevant (and less academic) output.
• Insure a standardized format and clear metadata across lesson transcripts and notes.

Conclusion

NotebookLM, with the right inputs, is well-suited to tracking and analyzing violin lesson. If you are an adult music student or a conservatory or college music student, I encourage you to try the tool to help track your progress and isolate practice methods. The tool will also be of interest to music teachers as it is useful to help track a student’s progress, assignments, repertoire, and technical growth over time, however this would need to be done with the consent of and deliberate collaboration with the student. I myself am interested to see how the tool helps me refine my practice and see my progress over time and I encourage my fellow music students to give it a try.