M2M Day 215: Using the Star Wars theme song (and others) to train my brain
This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For June, my goal is to develop perfect pitch.
Yesterday, I structured my pursuit of perfect pitch into three parts: 1. Develop relative pitch, 2. Internalize a reference note, 3. Practice to reduce computation time.
Today, I started on the first part: Developing relative pitch.
As a reminder, relative pitch is the ability to identify a musical note in comparison to a reference note. For example, if I first play a C on the piano, I should then be able to identify any other note based on its relationship to C (assuming I have relative pitch).
In music theory, this relationship is called an interval.
The most common way to internalize a new interval is to find a well-known song that features the particular interval and can thus be used to describe the interval. In other words, the hope is that, after hearing the interval, the related song is mentally triggered, and the interval can be identified based on its association to the song.
For example, the major second interval, which is the fancy name for the interval between a C and a D, is featured in the first couple notes of “Happy Birthday”. Thus, with a little bit of practice, every time I hear this interval, “Happy Birthday” is mentally triggered, and I can appropriately identify the interval as a major second.
Since I’ve decided to always use C as my reference note (for the rest of the month), I can forget about the fancy interval names and instead just use the note names: So, when I hear “Happy Birthday”, I can always think D.
In a similar way, I can assign other popular songs to the other intervals/notes.
For example, the interval from a C to an E is featured within the song “When The Saints Go Marching In”.
The interval between a C and an F is featured within the song “Here Comes The Bride”.
C to G is featured in the “Star Wars” theme song.
C to A is featured in the NBC chimes.
I haven’t yet found a song that features the C to B interval (although, I seem to be able to recognize this interval without a song).
I also haven’t found songs for the intervals between C and the notes outside of the key of C (since these intervals are less used in popular music). This includes C to C#, C to Eb, C to F#, C to Ab, and C to Bb.
Before I spend more time looking for these mnemonic songs, today I figured I should first test out the effectiveness of the ones I’ve already selected.
Thus, I spent some time on Toned Ear (the perfect pitch training website), practicing all the intervals between C and the other natural notes (i.e. the notes in the key of C).
So far, this song-related approach seems to be effective and honestly not so hard to master. I suspect these are the easy intervals, but still… I’m happy with my progress.
Read the next post. Read the previous post.