I always knew that I didn’t have perfect pitch, but I was astounded to see how badly I did.
I wonder if I would have done better had I cheated and centered my sense of pitch beforehand, but I think I still would have done poorly… I think I’m pretty good with standard intervals, but I do pretty terribly when the pitches span octaves.
It’s worthy to note, though, that I did over twice as well on piano notes vs. “pure tones.” It’s funny how the instrumentation makes such a big difference. I know I used to have perfect pitch when listening to trumpet music, though I imagine that’s shot now.
BTW, they’re looking for families that have two or more members with perfect pitch so if you think you’ve got what it takes, you should definitely try it out!
heh, it was tricky, I must say. If they were mean, they could have slowly upped the progressions by a semitone to really throw off one’s bearings. having the piano at the end really helped a lot for me too. I lost some points early on…but I made a comeback to be score safely in AP-1
November 18th, 2006 | Permalink
well having perfect pitch has nothing to do with whether you’re a good musician. it’s a bonus, but it doesn’t help with musicianship or technique or timbre or any of the things that matter. when i was in college, my trick for learning intervals was associating them with songs. so an octave is “somewhere over the rainbow” and a perfect 4th is “here comes the bride”, etc.
November 18th, 2006 | Permalink