M2M Day 216: Getting a song stuck in my head, forever
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 began practicing my relative pitch, which is the first part of my three-part plan for developing perfect pitch.
While I still have significant work to do on this part, today, I continued on to the second part of my plan. I figured it’s best to train each part in parallel.
For this part, my goal is to be able to consistently produce a reference tone. In other words, I should be able to, at any time, without any assistance, sing the note C.
Yesterday, I was practicing my relative pitch in relation to C, so it also makes sense to choose C as my internally-produced reference tone. (Again, the idea is that… if I can always identify C, and can always identify any other note’s relation to C, I should be able to identify any note).
Consistently producing a C seems to be the hardest part of this month’s challenge. So, if I can figure this out, everything else should theoretically fall into place (I hope).
At first, my plan was to use my personal physiology as a way to consistently find the same note. In particular, I was thinking that I could use either the lowest note I can sing, or the highest note I can sing before my voice breaks into falsetto, as my reference tone.
There are two problems with the physiological approach: 1. Neither the lowest note or the breaking point note are a C, and 2. Even if they were, my vocal range would likely change day-by-day.
The physiological approach would have been great though, given that I wouldn’t have to train in any capacity — I would just use the built-in features of my body (hence, why I gave it some consideration). But, it seems that this isn’t an option.
So, here’s my actual plan: I need to find a song that’s in the key of C, that starts on the note C, and that I wouldn’t mind listening to hundreds of times.
Then, I need to listen to the song over and over again, until I can start singing it, in the correct key, consistently from memory. This seems like something that’s trainable.
If I can consistently find the starting note of that song, which will be a C, I’ll have my reference tone ready to go, and part 2 of my overall plan will be complete.
For now, I’ve chosen the song “Changing” by John Mayer, which starts on a low C, and then proceeds up the scale in the key of C. The song seems perfect for what I need.
Now, I just need to commit to listening to this song repeatedly until it becomes stuck in my head forever.
Read the next post. Read the previous post.
