The aural exam today was fine I think. It started out rather easy. Intervals should be ok, although I can't really tell for sure if I was 100% right cos each interval was only played once. According to the psychology textbook, 'auditory sensory memory is a form of sensory memory for sounds that have just been perceived.' The sound then enters short-term memory, which is the 'immediate memory for stimuli that have just been perceived.' So my brain would remember the interval as what entered my short-term memory, and subsequently what my brain thought the interval might be. Since each interval was only played once, I had no second shot at another sound entering my short-term memory to check if the answer I've arrived at was correct. Hehehe actually I don't know if all that reasoning was sound, I'm just trying to make use of what I remember of what I've read so far.

Melodic dictation should be ok, unless I made any careless mistakes, especially missing out naturals after writing accidentals. Then I will really bang my head against the wall. It started out really simple, but soon had some jazzy chromatic notes. The second half is quite nice actually haha... jazz-like. But I almost lost one-third of the marks. After the chromatic notes set in, I got distracted and wrote down the last third of the melody a tone higher than it should have been. Fortunately I discovered my mistake when I sang through it again when we had some time to look through our melodies after the last playing. Heng ah!!! Otherwise...

Types of chords were ok, quite easy. Just hope I got the inversions right. Rhythmic dictation fooled me at first. It was hilariously easy for the first two bars, and in slow 6/8 time also. But then in the third bar there were more small note values and I started to panic a bit. In the end I still managed to complete the whole thing, but I'm not sure whether the rhythm is right. Next was a chorale, and we had to name the types of cadences and keys. Confused big time! Other than the first and last, I was unsure about the rest. (Actually only the first if my 'academic guess' that the chorale will end in the tonic is wrong!) Er... once it started modulating in the second phrase I just lost my marbles and my hearing and my thinking processes. Anyhow tried to count/guess for the other three cadences.

The last part was another chorale, but played with deliberate mistakes and we had to spot the mistakes, with extra credit given for explaining what the mistakes were. It was fun and quite easy, cos in this sort of harmonic context of course any mistakes will stand out. But it was also worrying cos I think it was 20 marks (?), and I think both poot and I didn't have 10 mistakes in total. And that was only assuming that another 10 marks are for the extra explaining. *fingers crossed* lor, what else?

So much for the sunny weather in the past few days, it rained almost throughout the day today. Was quite depressing to walk to an exam in the rain, especially when I was nervous about the exam. But the sheets of rain made the vale look really pretty. It looked like the whole area was misty. Actually it could well have been... it was probably part mist and part rain. Current psychology-book-reading progress: 6 more chapters which I will scan through tomorrow morning before attempting the exam. Was intending to stay up but aiya whatever la, I sort of can't concentrate on reading already. What I've been doing since 11pm has been to scan the pages, which explains why after days of snail-paced progress I suddenly managed to speed up today.