Weeks 11-12 · repertoire · full-verse recall
Hear the verse once. Sing the whole thing back.
The rule
pass: ≥85% notes in ±50¢ · 4/5
The verse contour for Twinkle Twinkle drawn over time. Each segment is one note. Emerald segments are notes you hit inside the ±50¢ band; grey segments are misses. The typical failure pattern: hits at the start, drift toward the end. Of 14 notes, 12 land — over the 85% bar, so this verse passes.
Hear it first
First clip: a 14-note verse cued by the synth — pitches and rhythm. Second clip: a clean recall, every note in band. Third: the same verse with two notes wrong near the end — the typical memory-fray pattern. You hear which type of mistake matters.
What’s happening. Holding an entire 8–14 note verse in working memory and producing it in tune is the integration test for the whole 12-week curriculum. Pitch precision, phrase memory, tonal centring, and breath planning all have to be running at once. Untrained singers typically recall the first 4–6 notes accurately and then drift; the rule today is about resisting that drift.
Why short folk songs first. Twinkle, Mary, Row, Are You Sleeping — all 8–14 notes, all stepwise or small leaps, all in major. We’re not testing repertoire knowledge; we’re testing whether the recall machinery works on songs you’ve known since age four. Anything more complicated would conflate “forgot the tune” with “couldn’t hold the tonic.” The 85% threshold leaves room for one or two slips per verse — perfection isn’t required, but most of the verse has to land.
Why this is the capstone. If you can do this, you can sing songs without backing tracks — the entire point of the twelve weeks. Phrase-from-memory and two-phrase-memory upstream build the individual-phrase recall; this is the integration that turns those into a verse.
Session ahead
5 verses · 8-14 notes each · single playback then a 1.5s hold · 4/5 verses recalled promotes.