Appapalooza

            I had to give up my subscription to the Simply Sing app because my phone overheated each time I used the app, and by the end I couldn’t even get through a whole song without the app shutting itself down. Some days, when it didn’t heat up as quickly, I was able to get 10 or 15 minutes of practice done and discover new songs and feel like my friends were singing with me, but that was rare. Most of the time I would use the app for a few minutes and have to take a break for fifteen minutes while the phone cooled down and then I’d get another two or three minutes of practice before having to let it rest again. I ended up spending most of my practice time doing vocal exercises on YouTube, so the fifteen dollars a month I was spending on the app seemed like a waste. But the app was the thing that made sure I practiced every day, or at least felt guilty on the days when I didn’t practice, and I was afraid that without it all of my slow but steady progress would come to a halt.

So, I went looking for another app. I tried a lot of them: apps that focused on ear training (being able to hear and name a note), apps that emphasized karaoke (with most of the songs hidden behind a paywall), and apps that focused on vocal exercises or music theory or breathing. I ended up deciding to splurge ($4) on a month’s subscription to the KHansenMusic vocal exercises app, even though most of her fabulous exercises are available on YouTube, because it felt like a way to pay her back for watching so many of her videos for free, and because the app organizes lessons based on specific goals, like vocal recovery, smoothing out the break between chest and head voice, extending your range, or building resonance.             Then I went back to YouTube and created yet another playlist full of the songs I’d been practicing on the Simply Sing app, plus a hundred more, with the lyrics onscreen to help me along. YouTube doesn’t check my pitch accuracy the way the Simply Sing app did, but it’s free and has thousands of songs to choose from, so it’s good enough for now.

            The biggest lesson I’ve learned from all of this is, though, is that apps are a really good way to learn basic material and build new habits. Ideally, I’d have an app for each of my life goals and be able to check in on my progress in each one for a few minutes each day. There could be an app to coach me through each writing project, and an app for sending my work out to agents and editors, and an app to help me organize all of my doctors’ appointments and maybe an app to keep an eye on Tzipporah’s chicken treat intake. There’s something really encouraging about the (false) sense that someone is keeping track of my progress and cares where I’m struggling in my learning process. Recently, I saw a video on Facebook where these two guys said they realized they were addicted to their phones, so they created an app to help them reduce their screentime. I couldn’t tell if they were trying for irony or just lucking into it, but the message resonated anyway: sometimes you have to create an addiction to overcome an addiction. The most successful apps help people achieve something they really care about by leveraging their need for social approval and quick rewards to create long term habits.

            I haven’t found all of the apps I need in order to create the perfect life for myself, yet, but I could never have imagined things like Duolingo or YouTube when I was a kid saving up my allowance to pay for one Olivia Newton John album, so you never know. My hope is that educators and therapists (and doctors and whoever else) will figure out how to create and use these apps to help people learn the basic and boring things they don’t want to have to repeat a hundred times a day, and then they’ll be able to spend their valuable time focusing on the hard work that requires human interaction. That’s what should happen, but I’m afraid people will just use AI indiscriminately, for everything, and, of course, robots will take over the world and then humans will eventually get fed up and rebel and have to destroy everything and start over from scratch. Which is just a ridiculous waste of time and energy that could be better spent learning more languages on Duolingo. Just saying.

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?