M2M Day 240: Do I actually have 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.
Yesterday, I officially completed this month’s perfect pitch challenge: I successfully identified 20 consecutive, randomly-generated musical notes, without any reference, three times on video.
Even though I completed the challenge, as I defined it, I’m still not sure if I’m comfortable saying that I have perfect pitch.
Firstly, I’m still not “perfect”. I’ve become much more consistent, but I still make mistakes occasionally.
Also, I don’t recognize all notes immediately, especially if there aren’t any pauses between the notes. In other words, I still find that my interpretation of one note can be influenced by the note I hear before it.
Yet, there are also some indicators that suggest I’m actually closer to having genuine perfect pitch than I think…
Perhaps, most importantly, I always correctly identify the first note of every session. In other words, when there are no other musical sounds or reference points to confuse me, I identify notes with 100% accuracy and immediacy.
I definitely couldn’t do this if I didn’t have some form of perfect pitch.
The problem is that this “pitch identification in a vacuum” skill becomes less relevant and harder to maintain the deeper I work into a sequence of notes.
Over time, as I progress through a series of notes, my brain shifts from ‘perfect pitch’-style identification (of just plucking the note out of the air) to ‘relative pitch’-style identification (of comparing the note back to a mental reference tone).
In other words, I actually think I have perfect pitch, but the ability isn’t as dominant in my brain as my relative pitch abilities (which have been trained and synaptically hardened over the past 15 years of musical training). As a result, my relative pitch overpowers my perfect pitch abilities, confusing my brain and messing me up.
Occasionally, in the middle of a session, once my brain is already in relative pitch mode, a note will cut through and I will immediately hear it for what it is. The note bypasses my relative pitch default and finds it’s way to the perfect pitch part of my brain.
I suspect that if I continue to practice and strengthen my perfect pitch abilities, I could eventually overpower my brain’s relative pitch default and maintain genuine perfect pitch deep into a sequence of notes.
This month, because I had the 30-day deadline, I probably relied a little too heavily on my brain’s relative pitch skills to succeed. Thus, if I actually wanted to make my perfect pitch abilities dominant, I’d need to rethink my training and try to isolate just the perfect pitch components of the exercise.
Anyway, perhaps I do have perfect pitch, but it’s still only a quiet signal in my brain, getting suffocated by many stronger, more deeply engrained signals.
I’m not sure if this counts, but I’d like to think it does. And if not, at least my progress suggests that an adult could feasibly acquire genuine perfect pitch.
Semantics aside, I’ve clearly changed the way my brain perceives pitch, which is pretty cool.
Read the next post. Read the previous post.
