Something about pitches

Something About Pitches

CS50's problem set 3 was music-themed. The program played the pitches described in a .txt file. In that file a combination of letters (A-G) and numbers (2-5) was used to describe the frequencies in musical notes. But honestly I am not much of a music connoisseur. It goes not much beyond recognizing the latest songs that were played way to much on the radio lately. I don't know much of the concept "music".

So apparently, the very first step in learning anything about music is involves learning to recognize the relation between pitches. I found this app that plays some music for like 2 seconds and then plays a single pitch. The app insist it should be possible to recognize that single pitch after hearing the music for 2 seconds as "reference". In the very first level in this app, it only plays 4 pitches, C4 D4 E4 and F4.

First Attempt: Yeah, this is not going anywhere. Every single attempt of the twenty was a guess and I guess right 25% of the time. With only 4 options and no repeats, this is worse then random guessing actually, as that should be right 33% of the time. The music played in front of that one pitch doesn't seem to help very much 😖.

Second Attempt: Still not much pitch recognition going on here. But because their are only 4 pitches, there is quite some repetition among the pitches. I noticed three tings that made me able to perform slightly better than guessing:

1. If it play pitch A, then pitch B, then pitch A again, it's sometimes possible to tell that it was played two pitches ago, therefore guessing correctly. 
2. I became reasonably accurate this time around to guess whether pitch B was lower/higher then pitch A. So if pitchA was D4 and pitch B appears to be higher, I only had to guess between E4 and F4 and able to eliminate C4. 
3. once three different pitches were played in a single session, when the fourth came I could usually tell that this one wasn't played before and was the missing fourth pitch. 

On my second attempt I had 55% right, basically I was able to eliminate one because it never repeated and on average one more because of the three tings I noticed. 😋

Next Few Attempts: The highest and lowest of the pitches, C4 and F4, were slightly easier the get right then those in middle. I avaraged somewhere between 50% and 80% most of the time now except for one lucky streak where I got 95% (😲). As time went on, C4 (which is called the tonic), came to stand out more and more. After about 10 games of twenty attempt, C4 became so distinct that I only got it wrong when I misclicked and after a few more I also stopped having false positives for C4.

As The Attempt Kept Going: After every attempt, the app plays a resolution. That is, it plays every note from the pitch I should have guessed down to the tonic. So if I had to guess D4, it plays D4-C4. If I had to guess F4, it plays F4-E4-D4-C4. So the D4-C4 was repeated almost every time (only when I had to say it's C4, it didn't), So after a while whenever the single pitch was D4, I almost heard a phantom noise of C4 right after, making it possible to identify it was indeed D4. When both C4 and D4 were (almost) guaranteed to be guessed right, scores below 65% didn't happen anymore and most were 80% correct or higher.