Pitch matching game

How to play the pitch matching game

Tap the button and allow the microphone. A note plays for about a second and its name shows on the screen. When the screen says “Now sing it back”, sing the same note on “la” or “oo” and hold it for about two seconds. Any octave counts, so a low voice can sing a high note an octave down. Close enough is a hit: you see how many cents off you were and the next note comes. Too far is a miss: you hear the note again, then yours, and the screen says whether you were high or low.

Five hits open the next level, five more the one after. Level one plays only the natural notes from G3 to E4 (196 to 330 Hz), never more than a major third apart, and counts anything within 50 cents of the note (100 cents make a semitone). Each level after it widens the range, brings in the sharps from level three, allows bigger leaps and narrows the window by 5 cents, down to 25 cents, a quarter of a semitone, from level six on. Three misses end the run. Your score is the number of notes you hit, and your best run stays in this browser.

How to do pitch matching

Listen to the whole note before you make a sound, then hear it once more in your head. Take your breath while the note is still playing, so your voice starts on time. Start soft, on an “oo” or a “la” (a hum works too, as long as the phone still hears you), in the part of your voice where talking sits, and keep one vowel. If you are not sure where the note is, start a little below it and slide up until your voice locks with what you remember; once you have found it, sing it again starting right on the note. The game takes the pitch you held for most of the note (the median), so a short slide at the start costs little; a note that wanders does. Sing in the octave that is easy for you, not necessarily the one the note was played in: from level four the notes reach C5 and above, and a low voice sings those an octave down.

On a phone, use headphones or turn the sound up, so you hear the note clearly and remember it, sing from about an arm's length in a quiet room, and come in right after the note stops: the game listens until about three seconds after the note began. A late start, a word instead of a vowel or a loud room can cost you a note you sang well.

What each level plays

The range is where the played note sits, not where you have to sing it: octaves fold, so every level fits any voice. Where a run ends tells you what to practise. Misses at level one are usually timing: coming in late, or a note that never settles. Misses at levels two to five come from the leaps, finding a note far from the last one, and from the sharps. From level six it is fine tuning: the 25-cent window asks for the middle of the note, not just the right one.

Pitch matching, perfect pitch, slider and interval games

Several different games go by similar names. In a pitch matching game like this one you hear a note and sing it back: the note you just heard is your reference, so it trains the link between ear and voice, the first thing a singing teacher listens for. Can I sing in tune? does the same with five notes and measures each one, without levels.

In a frequency or slider game you hear a tone and drag a slider to it from memory, scored in hertz. No voice is involved: it trains pitch memory, not singing.

In a relative pitch or interval quiz two notes play and you say whether the second went higher or lower, or name the interval between them. No voice either: it trains the ear's sense of distance. Higher or lower and Interval ear training do that. A pitch memory game deals cards that each play a note, and you find the pairs by ear; the melody memory test trains the same memory with whole tunes.

A perfect pitch game asks you to name a note with no reference at all. That is absolute pitch, which a review by Takeuchi and Hulse (1993) puts at fewer than one person in ten thousand. You don't need it to sing in tune, and matching pitch well is not a sign of it. To find out, there is the perfect pitch test.

When you can't match pitch

Most people who miss every note hear the difference fine; their voice just doesn't go where their ear says yet. In Pfordresher and Brown's study (Music Perception, 2007), most of the untrained adults who sang far off pitch could tell pitches apart as well as anyone. Real tone deafness, congenital amusia, is rare: about 1.5 % of people, in Peretz and Vuvan's 2017 estimate.

If you can't tell whether you were high or low, train that first with Higher or lower, which needs no microphone; the tone-deaf test checks the hearing side in twenty rounds. If you hear the difference but your voice won't follow, stay at level one: hum, slide slowly towards the note, and stop where it sounds like one note instead of two. How to sing in tune takes it step by step.

A pitch matching app without the app

The game runs in the browser of an iPhone, an Android phone or a laptop, with nothing to install and no account. It plays the note, listens, and tells you after each note whether you matched it and by how many cents. It doesn't draw your pitch while you sing. For a live line, Hold a note draws one held note as you sing it, and What note am I singing? names the note live.

Pitch matching games for kids

For children there is Sing the note: each note comes in its Boomwhacker colour, four notes make a melody, there is no score, and a class mode gives every child one try. Echo singing goes one step further: a short tune of two to five notes, sung back, with no score. This game, with its cents and its three lives, suits teenagers and adults.

Questions people ask

How long should I practise pitch matching?

A few runs, five to ten minutes a day, once your voice is warm (a five-minute warm-up does it). Short sessions on most days do more than a long one once a week, and a tired voice drifts.

What are the 7 basic pitches in music?

C, D, E, F, G, A and B, the white keys of a piano; in solfège do, re, mi, fa, sol, la and ti (si in many countries). With the five sharps or flats between them there are twelve. Levels one and two play only the seven; the sharps come in at level three. If you learned Do Re Mi with fixed do, C is do and A is la.

What is the humming game?

Usually a party game: one person hums a song and the others guess the title. Google's Hum to Search does the guessing for you. This game goes the other way round: the phone plays, you sing. To hum a tune and keep it, Hum to MIDI turns it into notes.

Is there a card game called Pitch? Is it like euchre?

Yes. Pitch, also called setback or high-low-jack, is a trick-taking card game that grew out of the English game All Fours, played with a full 52-card deck for four points: High, Low, Jack and Game. Each player is dealt six cards and bids how many of the four points they will take. The highest bidder leads, or “pitches”, the first card, and its suit is trump. Euchre is a cousin: also tricks, trumps and usually two pairs of partners, but with 24 cards, nine to ace, and the two jacks of the trump colour ranked highest. This page is about the other pitch, the one you sing.

Then make something of it

Every run leaves a melody: the notes you sang, one after the other. It goes into Brumm inside a club track with a beat and a bass. No account, no upload: the notes travel inside the link itself.

Your voice stays on your phone: the game reads it in the browser and keeps nothing but your best score, in this browser. How the site counts visits.