How the Singing Test Differs From the Speaking Test
It is the same acoustic engine underneath, with three deliberate changes that make it fair to singing rather than speech.
The take is eight seconds instead of five, because a sung phrase needs room to move through several notes before its range means anything. Pitch range jumps from 6% to 20% of the score, and the ceiling for a full range mark rises from ten semitones to sixteen — a whole octave and a third. And the expressiveness target moves from about three semitones of pitch movement to about five and a half, since pitch variation that would read as instability in speech is simply melody in singing.
The practical consequence is that the two tests are not comparable. A voice that scores 8.2 speaking might score 7.4 singing without anything being wrong — the singing bar is set higher on purpose.
Your Vocal Range and What It Means
After each take you get your range expressed three ways: in semitones, in hertz, and as note names such as E3 to D#4. The semitone figure is the one worth tracking, because it is the only one that compares fairly across different voices — twelve semitones is exactly one octave whether you are a bass or a soprano.
Some rough reference points for the range used in a single comfortable phrase, not a full stretched range: an untrained singer typically covers eight to twelve semitones, a comfortable trained performance covers twelve to eighteen, and anything beyond two octaves in one continuous take is genuinely unusual.
To map your full range rather than the range of one phrase, record twice. First slide slowly down to the lowest note you can hold cleanly without dropping into vocal fry, and read the low note name from the result. Then slide up to your highest sustainable note without straining, and read the high note. Sliding matters — the pitch detector needs continuous voiced sound to track you, and jumping between notes leaves gaps it cannot follow.
A word of caution on the low end: vocal fry, that creaky rattle at the very bottom, is not a usable singing note and the analyser will often reject it as insufficiently periodic. That rejection is correct behaviour, not a bug.
Pitch Steadiness, Vibrato and What the Numbers Show
Pitch stability on the singing test comes from the same cycle-to-cycle jitter measurement used for speech, and it is one of the more revealing numbers for a singer. It captures the fine grain of how steadily your vocal folds are vibrating, at a scale far below the note-to-note level you can hear yourself.
Two things commonly drag it down. The first is inconsistent breath support: as the air runs out at the end of a phrase, both jitter and shimmer rise sharply, which is why the last two seconds of an eight-second take often carry the worst numbers. Recording a phrase you can comfortably finish, rather than one that leaves you gasping, produces a noticeably better result — and that is a real reflection of technique, not a trick.
The second is a cold or tired voice. Both raise jitter measurably, which is one reason singers who track these numbers weekly can often see a bad vocal day in the data before they consciously feel it.
On vibrato: a controlled vibrato is a regular oscillation of roughly five to seven cycles per second, and because it is periodic and deliberate it does not inflate the cycle-to-cycle jitter figure much. It does widen your measured pitch spread, which feeds expressiveness. An uncontrolled wobble, by contrast, shows up in both. If your expressiveness reads high while stability reads low, that combination is worth paying attention to.
Getting a Take That Represents You
Four things reliably produce a more representative result:
That third point is the one people get wrong most often. Any audible backing track, even quietly through speakers, puts competing periodic pitch into the microphone, and the pitch detector has no way to know which fundamental frequency belongs to you. Sing unaccompanied, or use closed-back headphones so no sound leaks back.
What This Test Cannot Tell You
It cannot tell you whether you sang in tune. The tool has no idea what song you chose or what notes you intended, so it can measure how steadily you held a pitch but never whether it was the right pitch. A confident performance of entirely wrong notes will still score well on stability.
It also cannot judge tone, phrasing, emotional delivery, diction, or whether your voice suits a genre — the things a vocal coach is actually for. What it does give you is an objective, repeatable set of acoustic numbers that respond to warm-ups, technique and vocal health, which makes it genuinely useful for tracking your own progress over weeks. Just compare against your own earlier takes rather than against anyone else's screenshot.
If you want the same engine applied to your speaking voice, with all seven sub-scores broken out individually, use the speaking voice rater.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does the singing rater score me?
The singing mode uses the same acoustic engine as the speaking test but re-weights it for singing: pitch range rises to 20% of the score, pitch stability to 20%, and the expressiveness target moves from around three semitones to around five and a half, because singing legitimately covers much more pitch movement than speech.
Does it check whether I am singing in tune?
No, and this is the honest limit of the tool. It measures how steadily you hold a pitch and how much range you cover, but it does not know which song you are singing or which notes you were aiming for. A confident, steady performance of the wrong notes will still score well on stability. Use it to track steadiness and range, not intonation accuracy.
How do I find my full vocal range?
One eight-second take only shows the range you used in that take, not your full range. To map your full range, record separately for your lowest comfortable note and your highest, sliding gradually rather than jumping, and read the note names from each result. Trained singers typically cover two octaves or more, while an untrained comfortable range is often around one and a half.
What does the voice type leaning mean?
It is a rough bucket — soprano, mezzo, contralto, tenor, baritone or bass leaning — inferred from your average pitch. Real voice classification depends on tessitura, timbre and register transitions that a short recording cannot capture, so treat it as a starting point rather than a verdict from a vocal coach.
Why did my singing score come out lower than my speaking score?
Singing is measured against a harder standard. Range is weighted more than three times as heavily, and the expressiveness target assumes real melodic movement. Holding a single sustained note for eight seconds will score well on stability but poorly on range, which pulls the total down.
Is my singing uploaded anywhere?
No. All analysis happens locally in your browser. Nothing is sent to a server, stored or recorded anywhere outside your own tab.