This week the Paly Voice sat down with music enthusiast and Vikapella member senior Jenny Xin, to discuss pop music, her perfect pitch and choir.

Xin has participated in choir for all four years of high school, but claims it has not influenced her music taste substantially, despite its importance to her musical education.

“My music taste is independent from choir,” Xin said. “However, choir has exposed me to a lot of new ideas musically, and stylistically, and I’ve kind of learned what makes the songs I like listening to catchy. And kind of been able to learn about popular music throughout the ages. Even though I don’t listen to a lot of the songs we sing in choir it is definitely really interesting to learn about them and perform and that has definitely broadened my musical horizons.”

Over the course of Xin’s musical career, she has been able to develop something called perfect pitch.

“So perfect pitch is generally like being a glorified tuning fork,” Xin said. “Basically perfect pitch or relative pitch means just being able to identify notes by their name, so if you hear the letter C or E or A flat you’ll be able to hear that note in your head.”

Despite the talent that stems from having perfect pitch, Xin explains that it is more of an annoyance when it comes to listening to music.

“It gets kind of annoying. It’s not really a help as much as it is a giant pain,” Xin said. “I’ll listen to a radio station and sometimes they’ll pitch their songs to avoid copyright issues and so I can kind of realize that it annoys me the whole time.”

According to Xin, she most enjoys listening to high tempo upbeat songs, however, her individual music taste is difficult to categorize.

“A lot of the songs I listen to are so different I’m not really sure what the underlying theme is,” Xin said.” For me, it is to an extent lyrical but also the production behind the song. But mostly I tend to like really upbeat catchy music.”

Additionally, Xin described how her music preference has evolved in high school.

“I used to think listening to mainstream pop was kind of a guilty pleasure thing, but I think I enjoy more now without too much shame, and I have gotten more into musicals,” Xin said. “My music taste has definitely developed. Before I would mostly be listening to classical or pop music but now I listen to everything.”