This color test has you arrange 10 colors to count across from fixed colors at both ends. This tests whether your brain can see each color as they mix one into the other in both directions. You need to do it both directions because if you count across in one direction, you make errors toward the other end. You need to count from one color value, meaning you subtract more and more of it. If you keep going, you approach the other end having subtracted most and then all that’s visible of the original color. When you counted away nearly all of a color, then you’re trying to count whatever the other color is, but that’s a bit nothing in one view and a bit of something in the other. It’s easier to count a bit of something than a bit of nothing, so you’re more likely to commit an error if you try to count bits of nothing. So you need or at least should count in each perspective. But you also need to count in both because you need to combine them to answer close calls. This is a learnable skill. It requires focusing on the amounts of color in a square in each direction and then combining them, repeating until the sorting is optimal. This is why pianos use equal tempering: if you try to tune this or that key to perfection, then other keys will become too imperfect – they sound bad – so you temper the notes, meaning change them, so they’re equally out of tune in every key. What’s ‘equal’ is the amount of error added to each note, made by dividing up all the error and allocating it across. By that I mean you take the furthest key, meaning the one that sounds the most off, and that is now an endpoint. You count in each key from that key’s perfection to that key’s furthest. That gives you allocations across the notes for every key. Then you reallocate at that level so the aggregate is not only that each key is a bit off but that it’s a bit off in every key. The neat part is that tempering is the same as temperature, meaning it’s the combination of cold to hot bidirectionally. (Bidirectionally means in each direction and in both directions.)
As a note, I got a 0, which is perfect. That takes me back to when they gave us a very short test to see if we could or would be in ‘band’. They played 2 pairs of notes and asked which of each was higher/lower. I’m terrible at that, but I can order intensely detailed, barely separate pitches when they occur in a flow, even if that flow is irregular and extends over a fair amount of time. I can hear a pitch difference a long ways apart as long as I can see the thread that’s making the pitches. It can be music or a book or life itself, but when notes are taken in isolation and played for me then I need to put them in motion in my head – playing them out, etc. – and can’t say higher or lower with certainty.
jomi: playing with perception 