exhausted again

Post 61 of 90.

I was up late again practicing guitar.

I worked on ear training with the new version of Absolute Pitch Blaster throughout the day. Whenever I was due for a break, I would fire it up on the laptop. I'm hoping this will keep things fresh in my ear.

The default speed setting for the melody words is a lot faster on this one. I'm having to slow things down now and then to see if I can hear the C. With really fast melodic examples, the C will sometimes "light up" in my consciousness in the way I've grown accustomed to, and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes I make mistakes and have to slow the bit way down before the C makes itself known. Sometimes I hear it, but I don't know which exact note in the sequence is announcing itself. It just seems to be "in there somewhere." The same thing often happens with chords. I couldn't tell you which note in the cluster is the C, but I know it's in there somewhere.

Someday, when I move on to other notes and become familiar with their individual chromas, it will be interesting to see if this clears up.

I mentioned this to Chris Aruffo over email, and he reported the same experience. His hypothesis is that the structural/relative pitch aspect of hearing is what will clarify it. The absolute pitch faculty tells you what notes are present, while the structural faculty tells you where they are.

It will be interesting to see.

I do have this sense that once you have a sense for the chroma of all 12 notes, it will be almost impossible to mistake what you're hearing.

When my ear is revved up from working with the program and I sit down to the piano keyboard, I've been amazed at how A and C are so completely different, and I marvel that I could ever have mistaken them for on another. They are nothing alike.

Intensifying perception of the C chroma after a session does seem to spill over, in general, to the other notes as well. A definitely seems to stand out from years and years of hearing guitar music in A. So many rock riffs are in A.

I've been curious to see if that will manifest in NST as well, but I'm not sure so far. A is indeed a handy tonality in NST. "Where It Goes" obviously leans on A quite a bit.

I went ahead and ran through some benchmarking routines in the new program for both absolute pitch and relative pitch (both scale degrees and harmonic intervals all built from a key root), and found I'd improved a lot. I was rated at 83% for spotting C in various clusters and melodic fragments, and I had shown a great deal of relative pitch improvement, even though I don't focus on that nearly as much.

The new chord training program now seems to be based on a key rather than chord types all built off of a single root. This is cool, in that it's now helping me work identifying whether I'm hearing the I, IV or V chord of a key (other chords to come later).

The old program for chord types from a single root is still there in version 4.0 if I want to work on it. In that program, I found right away that I could identify suspensions with almost 100% accuracy, while I had a tough time telling minor and diminished chords apart. I always loved the ambiguity and mystery of suspended chords and felt drawn to them, so I guess this shouldn't surprise me.