M2M Day 218: ‘Anticipating’ my way to perfect pitch
This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For June, my goal is to develop perfect pitch.
For the past couple days, I’ve listened to the song “Changing” by John Mayer about 12 times.
As I explained two days ago, my hope is that, if I listen to the song enough times, I’ll be able to sing it, in the correct key, completely from memory, whenever I want. Then, since the song starts on C and is in the key of C, my brain will be primed with C as its reference tone, and I’ll theoretically be able to use my relative pitch abilities to identify any other musical note.
I’m not sure how many times I’ll need to listen to the song before it’s fully internalized, but it’s definitely more than 12.
In fact, since the song is 3 minutes and 35 seconds long, if I wanted to listen to it 100 times, I would need to dedicate six hours to doing so. I’m not sure 100 listens will be enough, but I’m definitely not ready to devote this kind of time.
Plus, I’m not sure it’s necessary to listen to the entire song anyway. All I really care about is the first few seconds, which establish the reference tone and key.
Thus, I decided to chop up the song, and make a seemingly more optimal audio track. This track is 12 minutes and 42 seconds long, and features the first 17 seconds of the song, followed by 7 seconds of silence, followed again by the first 17 seconds of the song, followed by 7 seconds of silence, and so on… 32 times.
Here it is (I used YouTube for hosting, but it’s just audio)…
Using this new track, I can listen to the relevant part of the song 100 times in around 40 minutes, where 15 of those minutes will be silence.
Arguably, I could have made the periods of silence shorter, but I’m actually worried that I may have made them too short: I’m trying to use the periods of silence to build anticipation, which I think is the most important part of the training.
Let me explain…
If you’ve ever listened to the same album of songs over and over again (or the same playlist), where the songs are always played in the same order, then you may have experienced the phenomenon where you start anticipating the next song before it even starts.
The end of the first song acts as a mental trigger for the next song.
In the same way, I’m hoping to develop this kind of anticipation for the selected 17-second clip from “Changing”. By adding slightly more-than-necessary silence, I’m giving my brain the space it needs to “prepare” for the upcoming audio.
After all, eventually, when I’m testing my perfect pitch, I don’t want to consciously think about “Changing”. Instead, I just want to activate the mental pathway that knows how to anticipate and prepare to hear “Changing”.
In other words, I want to be able to instruct my brain to shift my mental reference frame into the key of C whenever I want.
I’m just using “Changing” and the audio track as my training mechanism.
I’ve also put together a second track that I plan to use for assessing my “prepare for the key of C” mental abilities (although, it may also help with training).
This track is 5 minutes and 30 seconds long, and features twelve copies of the 17-second clip from “Changing”, with 10-second spaces between each of the copies.
However, within each space, I play a series of piano chords in an attempt to confuse my brain. For example, in the first space, I play four chords that resolve to a C#, attempting to shift my mental reference into the key of C#.
The trick then is to overpower this natural urge, retrigger the “prepare for the key of C” pathway, and hopefully properly anticipate the 17-second clip from “Changing” in the correct key.
In the other spaces, I play chords that resolve to each of the keys, starting from C#, then D, then Eb, and so on, all the way up to B.
Here it is…
With these two audio tracks, I should be able to more effectively train my brain’s reference tone abilities without having to listen to all 3 minutes and 35 seconds of the song every time.
Read the next post. Read the previous post.
