Free singing tests, one question each.

Which singing test answers your question

Each test answers one question. Find yours in the left column.

Before you test your top notes, the vocal warm-up runs five, ten or fifteen minutes of hums, lip trills, sirens and scales inside your own range.

How to take a singing test so the result holds

1. Warm up first. Five minutes of humming, lip trills or slow slides. A cold voice usually tests a note or two short at the top.
2. Find a quiet room. A fan, a fridge or a television can read as a note. Hold the phone 20 to 30 cm from your mouth and keep it there for every note.
3. Headphones for the tests that play a note (can I sing in tune, the pitch matching game, the warm-up), or the speaker turned up. They listen after the note stops; headphones keep the played note out of the microphone. Wired ones are safest: Bluetooth headphones play every note a fifth of a second or so late.
4. Sing an open vowel, “ah”, “la” or “oo”, at speaking volume, and hold each note steady for about two seconds. Words and slides are harder to read.
5. Stay comfortable. When a note strains, scratches or needs shouting, the one below it is your comfortable top. A crack or flip on the way up is usually your voice shifting from chest into head voice, not your limit: the light notes above it count as reach, which the vocal range test lets you add. At the bottom, stop before the note turns into a creak (vocal fry); a squeak or a growl may not read as a note at all.
6. Help the low notes. A phone’s microphone hears little of a very low note, and a weak one can read an octave too high. Sing the bottom note a little fuller and keep the phone close; if a result looks an octave off, sing it again. A test reports what reaches the microphone, nothing else.
7. Test twice, on two days. Trust the notes that repeat.

Rate my singing: can a test tell me if I have a good voice?

Part of it. A test can measure what has a number: whether you land on the note, how steady you hold it, how wide your range is, which key you’re in. It can’t measure the rest of what people mean by a good voice: the colour of it, the style, whether a line makes someone stop and listen. That is taste, and it changes with training and with the song.

The “rate my singing” and “judge my singing voice” sites that hand out one score out of 10 or 100 mix the two. Some measure pitch and timing; others let an AI model give its opinion of the recording, and their own pages say two takes of the same performance can score differently. Use a score like that to compare your own takes, not as a verdict. The tests here never rate the voice itself, on purpose: they give the measurement, such as 4 of 5 notes within 25 cents, and what it means.

To judge your own singing, the best test is free and old. Record yourself on your phone singing a song you know, once along with the original and once alone. Listen the next day, not straight away. What a singing teacher listens for first:

• Pitch. Do the long notes land and stay? That part is what can I sing in tune and hold a note measure.
• Key. Does the song sit in your range, or do you strain at the top and disappear at the bottom? Many “I can’t sing” moments are a song in someone else’s key. Move it: the key finder names the key you sing it in where it feels easy.
• Breath. Can you finish a phrase without gasping, or going thin and breathy at its end?
• Time. Do you come in with the band or a little late? The rhythm test measures that without a microphone.
• Words. Could someone follow you without the lyrics in front of them?

A voice that does these five things sounds good to most listeners, whatever its colour.

What the results mean

Cents: how close counts as in tune

A semitone, the step from one piano key to the next (black keys included), is 100 cents. Most pitch tools count a held note within about 25 cents, a quarter of the way to the next note, as in tune; at 50 cents it sits halfway to the next note and sounds wrong. Tools draw the line differently: can I sing in tune counts 25 cents; others draw it anywhere from 15 to 40. Every singer wobbles more than that on short notes and slides, so judge the long ones.

Range: note names and voice types

A range is written as two notes, lowest to highest. The letter names the note, the number the octave: middle C is C4, the number goes up at every C, and A4 is the 440 Hz tuning note. Twelve semitones make an octave, so A2 to A4 is two octaves. An untrained voice is commonly cited at about one and a half to two comfortable octaves; practice adds notes, most of them at the top. A wider range is not a better voice.

The comfortable ranges the vocal range test matches you against (Hz rounded, A4 = 440):

The bands overlap on purpose, and sources differ by a note or two. Range alone doesn’t settle a type: where your voice is easiest (singers call it the tessitura) and where it shifts from chest voice into head voice count as much, which is why the voice type test asks for your easiest note first. Countertenors sing roughly the alto range, mostly in head voice. Neither test asks whether you’re a man or a woman; they read the notes.

Steadiness and vibrato

Hold a note counts how long your pitch stays within a quarter tone (50 cents) of the note, with any vibrato averaged out. A note that sags towards the end often means the breath is running low. Vibrato is a regular wobble around the note; in trained singers it usually runs about five and a half to seven and a half times a second (Johan Sundberg, The Science of the Singing Voice, 1987). A straight note without vibrato is a style, not a fault.

Can’t hit the notes: is it my ear or my voice?

Usually the voice. Congenital amusia, what people mean by tone deaf, affects about 1.5 percent of people (Peretz and Vuvan, 2017). Singing off the note is far more common, and most people who do it hear pitch normally: in Pfordresher and Brown’s study (2007), the poor-pitch singers told notes apart about as well as everyone else; the trouble was turning a heard note into a sung one. That link is a skill, and practice with feedback trains it.

Start with your ears: the tone deaf test needs no microphone, only listening and tapping. If your ears score well and your voice lands off, the pitch matching game and the five steps in how to sing in tune come next. If you’re starting from zero, how to start singing puts the tests in order.

Will my results change?

Yes. A range moves from day to day with tiredness, a cold and the hour (most voices reach fewer high notes in the morning), and it grows over months of practice. Pitch matching improves with practice too. Retest every few weeks under the same conditions: the same room, the same time of day, after the same warm-up. Over a life a voice moves as well: it keeps maturing into your twenties, women’s voices often sit a little lower after menopause, and men’s often rise a little in old age (for speaking pitch, Hollien and Shipp, 1972).

Sight-singing tests and exam aural tests

A sight-singing test gives you a melody on paper you haven’t seen and asks you to sing it, usually after the key chord is played. Graded exams test singing in their aural section too: in ABRSM’s graded exams, Grade 1 asks you to sing back short phrases played on the piano, and from Grade 4 you sing a few notes from the score. ABRSM’s singing exams also have their own sight-singing test at every grade, a short song sung at sight, separate from the aural tests. The boards revise these tests, so check the current syllabus.

There is no sight-singing reader here. The pitch matching game practises the sing-back one note at a time, the melody memory test trains keeping a phrase in your head, and interval ear training the distances between notes that sight-singing is built on.