I remember my first musicianship lab, an often tedious requirement in the Music Department that accompanies any introductory music theory course at UCSC. When my roommate and I got to class, our TA, Nick, was zoned out, staring off at the wall, and effortlessly conjuring one obscure chord after another.

I’d always loved music, and had a relatively easy time absorbing the mathematics of western notation, but the one thing that frightened me most was the idea of sight-singing, or, more colloquially, reading a melody off a piece of paper and singing it in front of the class.