M2M Day 229: Doing it the old-fashioned way

Max Deutsch
2 min readJun 18, 2017

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This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For June, my goal is to develop perfect pitch.

Today, I’m in New York, staying at my parents’ house.

Yesterday, I commented that I wasn’t too worried about the environment change, given that my training “only requires a decent WiFi connection and my phone or computer”. But, this morning, I woke up to find out that the WiFi in the house was down.

Not only that, but my parents live in a rural, wooded area, so there’s never really any cell signal in the house either (i.e. no opportunity to use my phone’s hotspot).

As a result, if I wanted to practice my perfect pitch today, I had two options: 1. Go drive somewhere with WiFi, or 2. Practice the old-fashioned way.

I opted for the old-fashioned way, which required a family member to sit at the piano, play notes, and validate my guesses.

The piano hasn’t been tuned for at least ten years (side note: it’s not actually possible to perfectly tune a piano anyway), but it was close enough to use.

A couple hours ago, the WiFi came back, and I was able to transition back to the computer. The old-fashioned way is more fun, but the computer offers up better analytics at the end of my sessions (plus, the computer is willing to practice for hundreds of notes at a time without getting bored).

Today, I was consistently scoring around 75–80% across 10 out of the 12 notes for hundreds of iterations.

As I mentioned, my goal is to get this number up to 100% in the next three days, so I can stick to my timeline and progress to 11 notes.

(Side note #2: I’m glad the WiFi came back. Otherwise, I would have needed to go on my WiFi expedition anyway to share today’s post).

Read the next post. Read the previous post.

Max Deutsch is an obsessive learner, product builder, guinea pig for Month to Master, and founder at Openmind.

If you want to follow along with Max’s year-long accelerated learning project, make sure to follow this Medium account.

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