Vocal Range Test

About the Vocal Range Test

Find out how low and how high you can sing. The test listens through your microphone in three short steps: a moment of silence so it can hear the room, a slow glide down to your lowest comfortable note, and a slow glide up to your highest. Only notes you hold steadily for a moment count, so a passing squeak, a breathy start or a cough does not stretch your range.

You get your range as note names (for example G2–E4), in hertz, as a span in semitones and octaves, and — if you choose your Sa — in sargam (Pa of the lower octave to Ga of the upper, say). A chart puts it beside the typical ranges of the usual voice types, from bass to soprano, as rough conventions: range alone does not decide a voice type. Your widest result is kept in this browser, and reference tones help you find and check each note. Nothing is recorded or uploaded.

Common uses

• Choosing songs and keys that suit your voice, and a Sa for your riyaz.
• Practising in tune inside your range afterwards, with the Singing Pitch Trainer.
• Choir singers checking which part their range fits most easily.
• Tracking your range over months of practice (the widest result is kept).
• Teachers checking a new student’s comfortable range quickly.

How the test hears your notes

About 25 times a second the page reads the latest 4,096 samples of your microphone (about 85 ms) and finds their pitch with the McLeod Pitch Method (P. McLeod and G. Wyvill, A smarter way to find pitch), using the open-source pitchy library. Frames that are too quiet (below a level set from your room’s own noise), too noisy or breathy (the method’s clarity is low), or outside a voice’s range (about 60 to 1,600 Hz, B1 to G6) are ignored.

A note counts only when your pitch stays within 40 cents of its own middle for 300 ms, so a quick glide, a wide wobble or a one-off jump does not count, while the slow end of a glide can. Pitch trackers sometimes read a note an octave off; a jump of about an octave has to repeat before it is believed. The browser’s echo cancellation, noise suppression and automatic gain are switched off, because they colour a voice and move its level.

Notes and hertz

Notes are named in scientific pitch notation, where middle C is C4 and the number goes up at each C. Their frequencies follow equal temperament from A4 = 440 Hz, the standard tuning frequency (ISO 16): f = 440 × 2^((n − 69)/12) Hz, where n is the MIDI note number (C4 = 60 = 261.63 Hz, G2 = 43 = 98.00 Hz). Your range is rounded to the nearest note; the live readout also shows how many cents you are above or below it.

Voice types are more than a range

The chart shows the typical ranges Wikipedia’s Voice type article gives — soprano C4–C6, mezzo-soprano A3–A5, contralto F3–F5, countertenor E3–E5, tenor C3–C5, baritone A2–A4 and bass E2–E4 — as rough guides. As its Vocal range article puts it, range alone does not determine a voice type: teachers also listen to where your voice is most comfortable (its tessitura) and to its colour (timbre). Choirs, which divide parts by range, are the closest fit to such a chart.

Your range in sargam

Tick Show my range in sargam, choose your Sa, and each end of your range is named as a swara of the lower (mandra), middle (madhya) or upper (taar) octave. With Just intonation the swaras are placed at the ratios of a common five-limit just scale (Pa 3/2, Ga 5/4 …) instead of the equal-tempered semitones of a harmonium; the ends of a range rarely change name either way.

Limitations

• A range, not a voice type, and not a check of your voice’s health: if singing hurts or your voice changes suddenly, see a teacher or a doctor.
• Falsetto, head voice and the whistle register count when you hold them steadily. To measure only your chest (modal) voice, stop before you flip into falsetto.
• Notes are heard from about B1 (60 Hz) to G6 (1,600 Hz): the lowest notes of a few basses and the top of the whistle register lie outside that, and the chart shows C2 to C6.
• Teenagers’ voices change, especially boys’: a range measured during the change can move within weeks.
• Some phone and laptop microphones pick up very low notes weakly; a bass may get a fuller reading with headphones that have a microphone, or an external one.
• A noisy room, music playing or a second voice can stop notes from counting. Use a quiet room; with the reference tones, use headphones.
• Bluetooth microphones often lower the sound quality while they are in use; a wired or built-in microphone is more reliable.

Privacy

On this device: nothing is sent

Everything happens in your browser. What you enter or open here is not uploaded or stored by MySmartCoPilot.