M2M Day 238: 100% perfect pitch! (but am I just lucky?)
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 successfully identified 20 consecutive, randomly-generated musical notes (without any reference).
Since this is exactly how I defined my perfect pitch success criteria, I’ve technically completed this month’s challenge. However, I’m not going to officially declare the challenge complete until I film one of these 100% sessions.
I don’t think it will be too challenging to capture one of these sessions on film though, since it seems that I’m fairly consistent now: After I got home for the night, I completed another 20-note session and again successfully identified all 20 notes.
Interestingly, in this second session, I only heard 10 out of the 12 notes, and, in particular, I didn’t hear Ab or F#, even though they were enabled. There’s a 2.6% chance of this happening.
Since these two notes were the last two I added to my training, I theoretically could have identified this sequence of notes last week (when I was practicing with only 10 notes).
In other words, if I was luckier, I could have already completed this month’s challenge. Of course, luck doesn’t really capture the spirit of the challenge (perfect pitch is more about consistency than anything else) — but it is interesting to consider how luck plays a role:
For example, there’s a 0.3% chance that a 20-note sequence would only feature the notes C, D, Eb, E, F, G, A, Bb, B. Since I could consistently identify these 9 notes two weeks ago, if I had been even luckier, I could have had my perfect 20-note performance then.
Taking things even further, in the first week of practice, I was able to consistently and quickly identify the seven notes in the key of C. Since there’s a 0.002% chance that a 20-note sequence would only feature these notes, with a enough iterations and brute force, I could have even completed the challenge then.
And, of course, if I didn’t practice at all, and just wanted to leave things up to complete luck, I’d have a 0.000000000012% chance of guessing 20 random notes in a row.
So, my success criteria isn’t perfect — it can be reached with halfway developed skills and excessive effort.
Nevertheless, I’m more interested in actually developing genuine perfect pitch, rather than letting the probabilities occasionally work themselves out, so I’ll continue to focus on consistency and repeatability.
Read the next post. Read the previous post.
