M2M Day 221: I retested my (partial) perfect pitch, and scored 100%
This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For June, my goal is to develop perfect pitch.
It’s nine days into this month’s challenge, so it’s probably time to share an update on my progress.
For the past week, I’ve focused on improving my pitch identification abilities within the key of C, and, today, I perfected this skill: In the below video, I identify all 60 of the 60 notes that are played.
Based on this video, it may seem like I’m more than halfway to my perfect pitch goal. After all, I can consistently identify 7 out of the 12 musical notes.
But, in reality, I’m still very far from having perfect pitch.
Let me explain…
When all the notes are in one key (in this case C), it’s very easy to maintain the mental reference frame of the key. As a result, it isn’t too challenging, with some practice, to learn each note’s color within that reference frame.
However, once additional notes (that live outside the key) are added, these new notes tend to warp my mental reference frame, challenging my ability to maintain a consistent reference tone.
For example, I tried to introduce a Bb today, but, upon doing so and hearing the Bb, my brain shifted into the key of F, completely abandoning my C reference frame. This is because Bb is in the key of F, but not in C, so my brain tried to make sense of the new tonal information and, as a result, reestablished a new, undesired reference frame based around F.
Thus, for the rest of the month, I’ll need to figure out how to integrate the remaining out-of-key notes into my repertoire, while preserving my mental reference frame of C.
I’m not exactly sure the best way of doing this yet, but at least I have a steady foundation within the key of C to build on top of.
Read the next post. Read the previous post.