M2M Day 234: Brain humming?!
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 rushed through my practice, mostly just going through the motions. My poor performance reflected this.
Today, I had plenty of time to take an unrushed, thoughtful approach to my training, and it definitely paid off.
After warming up, I started my first 100-note session (across 11 out of the 12 notes), and scored my personal best of 95%.
This 95% performance was slightly aided though: After each note played, I softly hummed the resolve back to C, which allowed me to easily maintain my reference frame throughout the entire session.
Last week, I made the decision to stop humming as part of my practice, as I figured this crutch would prevent my brain from fully absorbing the lessons.
However, today, I found out that this wasn’t exactly the right conclusion/decision: Humming the resolves as part of my training actually helps my brain more quickly learn to hear notes within an unwavering context.
After training with humming for a while, I was able to comfortably transition to ‘humming’ in my head (i.e. not out loud). And then, I was able to stop consciously ‘brain humming’ all together, instead allowing my brain to naturally understand the notes in the correct context.
At the end of this hum-based progression, I was able to score 90% on another 100-note session without any audible humming or extra mental support.
I plan to use this humming progression as my warm-up every day for the rest of the month, which I think will really help me.
Yesterday, I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to progress past eleven notes this month, so I’m glad I let myself experiment a bit today: I see a path forward, with the humming progression as an important part of it.
Read the next post. Read the previous post.
