Step 1 of 5 · Hear it
The note you sing is more than one tone.
Sing a note that vibrates 100 times a second, and your voice is also making 200, 300, 400 and more, all at the same moment. You hear one note. It is really a stack of tones. On this page a machine takes that stack apart so you can hear the pieces. You do not sing anything yet.
If this is new to you
Let the app show you first
Seven short steps. Each one tells you where to look and what to listen for, then plays it. Nothing moves on until you press Next, so take as long as you like and replay any step as often as you want.
- One ordinary sung note.
- Single tones taken out of that note.
- Those same tones twice, as two different vowels.
The tones inside one note
Each button plays one tone out of a single sung note. Press them in order, lowest first. Nothing is being added — these are all already in the note.
These are the tones inside G3 — the note set further down this page.
Press any tones to switch them on. Press again to switch them off. Build whatever blend you like.
Played together they stop sounding like eight things. They become one note, on one pitch, with one vowel.
Why 100 Hz also makes 200, 300 and 400 — and what these tones are called
The tones above your note vibrate at whole-number multiples of it. A note at 100 Hz also produces 200, 300, 400 Hz and so on up. That is why they sound like one note rather than a chord.
You will hear these called overtones, partials or harmonics. They are three words for the same thing. This app just calls them tones.
The eight buttons are the first eight. A real note carries many more above them.
Two things you can change, and they are not connected
Singers mix these two up constantly. The controls are separate on purpose.
Neither of these two controls makes a sound on its own. You hear the change by pressing Hear this note, just above.
- Press Hear this note and listen.
- Switch the size to Small and press it again. The note is exactly the same pitch — it just sounds brighter and smaller.
- Put the size back to Large. Now move the note slider instead and press play again. Same size of person, different note.
See someone do this with their own voice
In this video a singer holds one note and makes single tones inside it loud enough to hear on their own — the same tones the buttons above are playing for you. The moving picture beside him shows each tone as it appears.
Watch it on YouTube — opens in a new tab.
This is the one that matters
Same tones. Different vowel.
Now the same tones twice, on the same pitch. Listen for what changes.
Watch the bars as you press each button. The bars show how loud each tone is.
The mouth shape that does it
These are the two shapes your mouth and throat make for those vowels. The tongue moves, the jaw opens, and that changes which tones come out loudest.
About these pictures
Drawings of a typical mouth and throat, not a scan of any singer, and not measured from the numbers this app uses elsewhere. Two of the seven vowels show the closest shape we had a drawing for, and each one says underneath which vowel it really shows.
Step 2 of 5 · Your voice
Your voice has those same tones in it.
In step 1 a machine took a note apart for you. Now the app does it to a note you sing. You hold one note for three seconds, and it plays your own recording back with everything removed except a single tone — so you can hear one tone lift out of your own voice.
First
Record three seconds
- Press Record and allow the microphone if your browser asks.
- Sing one comfortable note on “ah” and hold it until the countdown reaches zero. Steady matters far more than pretty.
- Wait a few seconds while the app works out what is in your note.
Record a note first. The tone buttons below switch on as soon as it has something to work with.
Then
Hear one tone at a time out of your own recording
Press Whole sound first, to hear your recording as you sang it. Then press any numbered tone. You hear that same note of yours again, with everything stripped away except that one tone. It came out of your voice — it is not a synthesiser imitating you.
How loud each tone was in your voice
One bar per tone, lowest at the bottom. A long bar means your mouth was making that tone loud on the vowel you sang. This is the same picture as step 1, except these are your numbers rather than the machine’s.
When you play a single tone, its bar moves in time with the sound so you can see which one you are listening to. Each tone is played at a comfortable level so the quiet ones are still audible — the bars, not the loudness, show their real strength.
Very pure or very breathy notes can fool any pitch detector by exactly one octave. If the note named above is not the one you sang, these fix it, and the app remembers the correction for the rest of your visit.
Step 3 of 5 · Move it
Pick a bar and make it as tall as you can, then hold it there.
Steps 1 and 2 were listening. This one is doing. The app listens while you sing and shows you, live, which tone your mouth is making loudest — so you can move your jaw and tongue and watch what changes.
- Press Start listening and allow the microphone.
- Sing one comfortable note and hold it. Five bars will start moving.
- Keeping that same note, slowly move your jaw and tongue as if sliding between vowels. Watch which bar grows.
- Pick whichever bar you like and try to make it the tallest. Then hold it there.
The five bars are the first five tones in whatever note you are singing, lowest on the left. The gold mark on each one stays at the tallest that bar has reached, so you can see your best without having to watch continuously.
Three things worth trying, once the bars are moving
- Slide between vowels on one held note. Watch a different bar take over each time. You are moving your mouth’s loud spot around, without doing anything to your throat.
- Hold one vowel and climb a slow scale. Watch the tallest bar hand over from the 2nd tone down to the 1st. That handover is the moment your voice would flip — and here you can watch it coming.
- Climb again, but open your jaw as you go. See how much longer you can keep the 2nd bar on top. That is exactly what changing your vowel buys you on a high note.
A ninety-second exercise once you are comfortable here
The idea is to hear something, then make it yourself, then check that you did.
- Go to step 5, open tool 3, and press Play it with labels. The app holds one note and slowly slides the vowel from “ee” toward “ah.” Listen to each tone swell in turn, and read which one it names.
- Come back to this page. Sing one steady note and make that same slow slide yourself, from “ee” toward “ah.”
- Watch the bars. The tallest one should move along in the same order you just heard. If it does, you have produced the thing you were listening to.
Use this briefly, then put it away — why that matters
Watching a meter while you sing turns your attention inward, onto how you are making the sound. That kind of attention gives quick gains that hold up poorly under pressure, which is the opposite of what this is for.
Use it to find the feeling, repeat it two or three times with the screen turned away, then leave it. The meter is here to shorten the search, not to sing with.
Step 4 of 5 · Why
Why some notes feel easy and some feel like work.
Every singer knows the feeling: the same note is comfortable on one vowel and a fight on another, and somewhere as you climb, everything changes. This page shows you the reason, and it is not mysterious.
- why one vowel is easier than another on the same note,
- why that changes as you sing higher,
- and what to change when a note starts to fight you.
Start here
Let me read the chart with you
Six short steps. Each one lights up one part of the chart, moves the note for you and plays it, so you can watch it happen and hear it at the same time. Nothing moves on until you press Next.
- Lines that move — the tones in the note you are singing.
- Marks that stay put — the loud spot of each vowel.
- Whether the two line up is the whole story.
The chart starts with only the two things that matter most. Switch any of these on to see more of what is going on.
Park the note high in the range, then switch between Classical and Belt. The marks drop for one and jump for the other. Same note, opposite solutions.
A full bar means one of your tones is sitting right under that vowel's loud spot, so it should feel easy and full on this note. A short bar means it has little or nothing to work with. Tap any vowel to hear it.
Reading the chart
Point at any line below and the matching part of the chart will light up. On a phone, tap it.
- The lines that move. These are the tones in the note you are singing — the same ones you pressed in step 1. Move the slider and they all climb together, because they are all part of that one note.
- The marks that stay put. One for each vowel. Each sits at that vowel's loud spot: the frequency your mouth amplifies when it is making that shape. It is not a pitch. It makes no sound of its own — it just makes louder whatever arrives there. That is why it does not move when you change notes. It only moves when you change vowel.
- The sweet spot. You already know the feeling: on any given note, some vowels sit easily and others feel thin or effortful. Each vowel has a sweet spot — the place where one of your tones sits right underneath its loud spot and gets amplified for free.
- It is a matter of degree, not on or off. The brighter and larger a vowel's mark, the closer that vowel is to its sweet spot on this note. The bar under each vowel name below shows the same thing. Nothing switches on or off — vowels move toward their sweet spot and away from it as you change note.
- The sweet spot hands off as you descend. Lower the note and your 2nd tone drops away from a vowel's loud spot — but the 3rd tone rises into it, then the 4th. Low notes have their tones packed close together, so something is nearly always near the loud spot. That is why low notes feel comfortable on almost any vowel, and high notes are fussy about which one you choose.
- Why they change as you climb. Your tones move up. The marks do not. So a tone slides up into one vowel's sweet spot, brightens it, then passes above the loud spot and that vowel fades — while the next vowel up starts to brighten.
How this relates to the flip into head voice
When your voice flips, two things are changing at once.
This chart shows one of them: your tone slips above the mouth's loud spot, and you lose the free boost.
The other happens at your vocal folds — how they stretch and thin as you go higher. This app cannot see that part.
They happen around the same pitch, which is why they usually get talked about as one thing.
So what do I actually do about it?
Change the vowel. A different mouth shape puts the loud spot somewhere else, so you can park a tone back underneath it and get the free amplification again.
That is what singers mean by vowel modification. Step 5 builds you a route through the vowels for your own voice.
For ensembles
Why a chord locks, or does not
Four voices singing one chord. Three things decide how solidly they lock together, and you can switch each one on its own. Every box below plays.
pure ratios
equal temperament
- Tuning. Pure ratios make the parts share tones exactly, so they reinforce each other. Piano tuning sits slightly off those ratios, and the shared tones beat against each other instead.
- Vowels. The same vowel in every part puts every loud spot in the same place, so they all amplify the same tones.
- Vibrato. Moving pitch keeps the shared tones sliding past one another, so the lock never settles.
What this cannot tell us — barbershop has no measured data
The lock you hear comes from aligned loud spots and shared tones reinforcing each other. No measured vowel targets exist in the research for barbershop specifically, so treat this as the principle rather than a style model.
Step 5 of 5 · Practice
Four things you can work on.
Four things to try with your own voice. The first two go together: find the pitch where your voice changes gear, then get a plan for singing past it. The last two train your ear on two different sounds that are very easy to mistake for each other.
- Tool 1 — the moment your own voice wants to change gear, and that it happens at a different pitch on a different vowel.
- Tool 2 — that a planned change of vowel lets you climb past that moment without the fight.
- Tool 3 — the sound of a single tone swelling as your mouth starts amplifying it, then fading as it stops.
- Tool 4 — the bright edge high above the note that lets a voice carry, and how different it sounds from tool 3.
The app sings a line that climbs. You sing along with it. The moment your voice wants to change — lighter, thinner, or like it might crack — you mark it. Do that on “ee” and again on “ah,” and the app compares the two.
- Choose whether it climbs in steps or slides smoothly.
- Press Run on “ee” and sing along with it.
- The moment your voice wants to change gear, press Mark it or hit Space.
- Rest a moment, then do the same with Run on “ah.”
- Read what the comparison tells you underneath.
Steps are easier to sing along with. A smooth slide catches the exact spot rather than the nearest note, which matters because the change often happens between two notes.
This is what singers mean by vowel modification, written out as actual notes and vowels instead of described in the abstract.
- Run tool 1 first, so the plan is built around your own voice.
- Press Build my plan. The steps appear below, and the path is drawn on the step 4 chart.
- Press Sing it to me to hear it played.
- Sing it yourself, sliding between the vowels gradually rather than jumping.
The pitch never changes. The mouth shape slides slowly from “ee” toward “ah,” which carries the loud spot upward past your tones one at a time. As it arrives at each tone, that tone swells; as it moves on, the tone fades again.
Not brightness, and not a change of note. Listen for a tone to swell and get fuller, then thin out again — two or three times across the slide.
- Press Play it with labels and follow the readout as each tone swells.
- Then press Test me and mark each swell with the button or Space.
- A mark within seven tenths of a second counts as caught.
Ring is a band of brightness up around 2.4 to 3.2 kHz — far above the note being sung. It comes from a narrowing just above the vocal folds, not from your vowel or your jaw. Singers also call it squillo, ping or focus.
Measured centres: bass 2.42 kHz, baritone 2.55, tenor 2.84, alto around 3.0.
Both tones are the same note, the same vowel and the same loudness. Listen high above the note rather than at it.
With ring: a bright, metallic edge sitting on top. Present, close, cutting.
Without ring: the same note, duller and further away, with nothing on top.
- Press Play both, labelled as many times as you like.
- Only take the test once you can hear it when it is named.
- Answer First or Second.
Tool · Ring meter
Watch the bright edge come and go.
Some voices carry over an orchestra. That comes from a band of brightness far
above the note being sung — singers call it ring, squillo or ping. This page listens
for it while you sing and draws it as a line, so you can see it arrive and see it go.
This is the same thing as tool 4 in step 5. It is not the mouth's
loud spot that steps 1 to 4 are about.
What this cannot tell us — why there is no score to beat
This is a relative index: the energy in your singer's formant band measured against the low end of your own voice, in decibels. Dividing by your own low end is what lets it survive changes in loudness and distance from the microphone. It is still moved by the room, the microphone and where you stand, so it is honest about change within one session and says nothing about how you compare with another singer. No absolute target is shown, because no absolute target would survive being measured on a different laptop.
How to use this page
- Press Start listening and hold one comfortable note.
- Watch the line rather than the number. A flat line is the goal before a tall one.
- Now try a small bright nasty “nyah,” or a witchy cackle. Watch the line jump.
- Try to keep that brightness while you go back to a normal vowel.
- Press Stop, then drag Look back to review up to three minutes.
Why the tips talk about your throat and not your vowel
Ring comes from a narrowing just above the vocal folds, where the third, fourth and fifth resonances draw together. Opening the jaw or changing the vowel moves the boost instead — a different thing, living far lower. That is why this meter is kept apart from the bars in step 3.