I’m sort of curious why mnemonics would have anything to do with this. Mnemonics can help a person memorize the rules of grammar and the vocabularly for a foreign language, but without practice and repetition using those pieces one will never become fluent.
Same thing here, mnemonics will help you learn the naming convention, but it’ll do absolutely nothing for you in terms of identifying a pitch because that’s a skill. For some reason some people are born with it and others have to develop it, but it’s less a matter of memorization than it is of the ability of the brain to discriminate between different pitches and label them.
I only read the OP but I’m going to jump in really quick and say that while I don’t know much about “perfect” pitch, I did used to have a roomate at UT with perfect time (it was pretty cool, I would hold a stopwatch and his timing really was perfect, he could snap his fingers right on the turn of the 100th second) and he taught me one mnemonic which I have used to have an ear for the sixth, which I didn’t have before.
That orchestral jig for NBC… “Innn Beee Seeeeee,” taking the N as the root, the “B” is the sixth - that is the mnemonic that I used to learn the sixth by ear, so I can vouch for the usefulness of mnemonics for simple tasks of recognizing tones and intervals at least.
Alright, I should have read the thread first xD
Mr. Maestro already said all of this. But take the NBC thing as an extra example.
Indeed, that’s a method I was taught in school! A warning though: I had a classmate that, even though he knew the starting intervals of Für Elise are minor seconds, when he tried to sing the start he didn’t sing minor seconds at all. What I mean to say is that it’s not a foolproof method! You might not be singing the starting interval of that song as correctly as you think you are. Of course, you might not be singing at all.
Also, that’s an excellent chart because it covers both ascending and descending intervals. I’m only practiced in ascending and harmonic intervals, so when I hear a descending interval I have to convert it to ascending, which is time consuming. Learn descending and ascending!