What note am I singing?

What the page shows

Press Start microphone and sing one note. The large letter is the note nearest to the pitch you are holding, written as a letter and an octave number: middle C is C4, and the number goes up at every C (Wikipedia, Scientific pitch notation). Under it are these readings.

• Off by is how far you are from that note, in cents. A cent is a hundredth of an equal-tempered semitone, so +50 is halfway to the next note up (Wikipedia, Cent (music)).
• Frequency is the pitch itself, in hertz.
• Measured against is the note, and its frequency, that “off by” is counted from.
• Clarity says how regular the sound was, from 0 to 100%. A clean sung vowel scores high. Breath, consonants and two voices at once score low and are given no pitch at all.

How to read the trace

The grid is a keyboard turned on its side. Every horizontal line is a note, the shaded rows are the sharps, and the heavier lines are the Cs. Your pitch is drawn from left to right over the last ten seconds. A note’s true pitch is the line itself, so singing in tune means drawing along a line, not between two.

The trace is green where you are within the tolerance you chose and pink where you are not. A vibrato shows as a wave around a line. Where the trace breaks, the page heard nothing it was willing to name: silence, breath or a consonant. It does not fill gaps in.

Target note and the hold timer

Choose Target note, pick a note, and the grid centres on it with a band as wide as your tolerance. Play the target sounds it as a reference tone. The timer counts how long you stay inside the band without a break, and keeps the longest hold since you loaded the page.

The timer judges the centre of your pitch over the last third of a second, not each instant, so an even vibrato around the note does not end a hold and a drift out of the band does. A gap in the sound longer than a quarter of a second ends it. If the reference plays through loudspeakers the microphone hears it as well as you: use headphones, or stop the tone before you sing.

What it can and cannot measure

The page names notes from C2 to D6, which is 65.41 to 1174.66 Hz with A4 at 440 Hz: 51 notes. A pitch outside that span is reported as outside, not guessed at. It follows one voice. Two people singing, or a voice over music, is not one pitch and is usually refused.

The detector was measured on 7,344 synthesised test tones across that span. On the 3,672 tones with no vibrato and no added noise, the largest error in any answered frame was 0.29 cents and none named the wrong note. With a vibrato of ±50 cents at 5.5 Hz and noise 10 dB below the tone, the note readout was within 5.8 cents of the centre of the note in 95% of readings. Those are synthesised tones, not recordings of singers and not your microphone in your room. The full table and its limits are on the method and accuracy page.

The trainer reports pitch. It is not vocal coaching and not medical advice, and it makes no judgement of a voice. To tune a guitar, a violin or any other instrument, the chromatic tuner reads strings from 26 Hz up.

Your microphone

The microphone opens only when you press the button. It closes when you press the button again, when you leave the page, and when the tab goes into the background. The sound goes to a measuring routine inside the page and nowhere else: it is not recorded, not stored and not sent.

Your A4 setting, your choice of note names and the range measured on the range page are kept in this browser’s own storage so that the pages can share them. labs.llc counts visits with Google Analytics, as on every page; no sound and no pitch reading is part of that. The method page lists exactly what it is told.

A4 and note names

A4 is 440 Hz unless you change it, the standard tuning pitch (Wikipedia, A440 (pitch standard)). Set it anywhere from 415 to 466 Hz to sing with an instrument tuned elsewhere, and every note on every page moves with it. Solfège names replace the letters with fixed-do syllables, in which Do is always C (Wikipedia, Solfège).