What note am I singing?

How to find out what note you're singing

Tap the button and allow the microphone. Sing or hum one comfortable note on an open vowel, “ah” or “oo”, and hold it for a second. The note under the button follows your voice about twelve times a second: slide up and it climbs with you. Tap again to stop, or go quiet; after half a minute the microphone closes by itself.

The note that stays is the last one you held steady for 0.4 seconds, so a breath or a slide at the end doesn't replace it. Under it is how far you were from the centre of that note, in cents: within 5 it says dead on, within 20 it calls the note in tune. The page shows the note and the cents, not the Hz: the table below and the note frequency chart give the Hz of every note, and the pitch detector shows the Hz of what it hears. It reads pitch and nothing else, not your tone and not whether the voice is good.

How to read A3, C♯4 or F♯3

The letter is the note: C D E F G A B. A ♯ (sharp) is the black key just above it, so C♯ is the same pitch as D♭; this page writes sharps. The number is the octave, and it changes at C: B3 is followed by C4. Middle C is C4, 261.6 Hz, and the A above it, A4, is 440 Hz. Every note here is measured from that A in equal temperament, where each semitone is the twelfth root of 2, about 1.0595, times the one below. The reference is fixed at A4 = 440 Hz; to read against 442 or 432 Hz, the pitch detector lets you choose.

The voice ranges are the conventional ones of classical and choir teaching: bass E2 to E4, baritone A2 to A4, tenor C3 to C5, contralto F3 to F5, mezzo-soprano A3 to A5, soprano C4 to C6. Other software numbers octaves differently. Ableton Live, Logic and Cubase call middle C “C3”, FL Studio calls it “C5”: the pitch is the same, only the label moves. If two apps disagree by exactly one octave number, look up where each puts middle C.

Is it the right octave?

One octave up doubles the frequency: G3 is 196 Hz, G4 is 392 Hz. Both are G, and a man and a woman singing the same tune together are usually an octave apart without noticing. So if you expected G4 and see G3, the reading is often right and the expectation an octave off. Men singing along to a woman's song, and the other way round, mostly sing it an octave from the record.

A reader can also slip, most often on a very low or very breathy note where the overtone at twice the frequency carries most of the sound, so the wave looks almost as if it repeated twice as often. A slip looks like a sudden jump of exactly one octave while you held still. Sing the note again a little louder on “ah”: a real note stays where it is.

Sharp, flat and cents

A cent is a hundredth of a semitone, on a log scale: two frequencies are 1200 × log₂(f₁ ÷ f₂) cents apart. 443 Hz is 11.8 cents sharp of A4. At 50 cents you are halfway to the next note and the name changes, so “A4, 45 cents sharp” and “A♯4, 55 cents flat” are almost the same pitch. That is why a note sung right on the border flickers between two names.

A voice doesn't sit still. A trained singer's vibrato swings about 5 to 7 times a second, in opera up to a semitone either side (Sundberg, The Science of the Singing Voice, 1987), so the live reading moves even on a good note; the held answer averages its last five readings to look past it. This page calls 20 cents in tune for that reason. It is not the limit of the ear: in a quiet lab, listeners tell two steady tones near 1,000 Hz apart at 2 to 3 cents (Wier, Jesteadt and Green, 1977).

The note name only says which note you are nearest. Whether it is the note you meant needs a target: Can I sing in tune? plays five notes and measures how far you land from each, and the pitch matching game keeps playing them.

Why the note jumps around or shows nothing

• Words instead of a vowel. Consonants and breaths have no pitch. Hold the vowel.
• Music or a TV in the room. The reader takes the strongest steady pitch it hears, which may not be yours. Pause it, or sing with headphones on.
• Two notes at once. A chord, a second singer, a piano still ringing. One note at a time.
• Too quiet or too far away. Come within an arm's length of the phone. A whisper never reads: the vocal folds don't vibrate, so it has no pitch.
• Out of range. It reads from about 60 Hz to 2,000 Hz, B1 to B6. Almost every sung note fits; a whistle-register note or a high whistle may not.
• Right on a border. Halfway between two notes it flips between them. Move a little up or down and it settles.

Voice pitch test: what pitch is my speaking voice?

As a voice pitch analyzer for speech: say a long, relaxed “mmm” at the height you talk at, and hold it. Speech glides, so the live note moves; the note that stays is your speaking pitch around that moment. Typical adult speaking voices sit at about 85 to 155 Hz for men, roughly F2 to D♯3, and 165 to 255 Hz for women, roughly E3 to C4 (Baken, Clinical Measurement of Speech and Voice, 1987). The note frequency chart gives the Hz of the note you got. Most people sing well above the pitch they speak at.

Questions people ask

Is there an app or website that tells me what note I'm singing?

This page does it online, free, without an install: it runs in the browser on an iPhone, an Android phone or a laptop. Apps such as Vocal Pitch Monitor and Singscope draw your pitch as a line over time, which helps with whole phrases. For how steady one long note is, there's Hold a note.

Can you tell me what key I'm singing in?

Not from one note: any note belongs to seven of the twelve major keys. Hum a whole line into What key am I singing in? and it names the key and the runner-up.

Is there an app that can tell me what song I am singing?

That is a different job, matching a tune against recordings. The Google app's hum to search (since October 2020) and SoundHound do it from a few seconds of humming. This page names notes, not songs.

Is C5 a high note for a girl?

C5 is 523 Hz, the C an octave above middle C. It sits inside the usual range of every female voice type above, so for a woman it is mid to high, not extreme. For a man it is the tenor's famous high C, the top of his range.

Can Ariana Grande sing 7 octaves?

No. She is usually credited with about four. Seven octaves would be almost a whole piano, which spans seven and a quarter, A0 to C8. A comfortable range of one and a half to two octaves is common; find yours with the vocal range test.

What's the rarest female voice type?

The contralto, the lowest female voice, is the one usually named, though nobody has counted. Where yours sits: the voice type test.

Can I test my sense of pitch?

Naming what you sing and telling two pitches apart are different skills. The US National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders puts real trouble with pitch at 2 to 5 percent of people in the US (2014). The tone-deaf test checks yours in twenty rounds, with no microphone.

Does it work for an instrument, or any sound?

For one note at a time, yes, but it is set up for voices. For a note identifier by sound, to answer “what note is that?” for a guitar, a piano or anything else, there's What note is this?, for tuning the chromatic tuner, and for a sample or an 808 with Hz and an octave check the pitch detector.

How a phone hears the note you sing

A sung or hummed note is a periodic wave. The vocal folds open and close a fixed number of times a second, and that rate, the fundamental frequency, is the pitch. The sound also carries overtones at two, three and four times that rate; they give the voice its colour, not its note. This page doesn't look for the loudest frequency. It looks for the delay after which the wave repeats, with a method called YIN (de Cheveigné and Kawahara, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2002), in windows of 40 milliseconds, and takes the median over the last fifth of a second.

That matters on a phone. Even when a small microphone carries little of a deep voice's fundamental, say 100 Hz, its overtones at 200, 300 and 400 Hz still repeat together every hundredth of a second, so the period, and the note, survive. It is also why a hum reads as well as a sung “ah”: the mouth is closed and the overtones are softer, but the repeat is the same. The page asks the browser to switch off the noise suppression and automatic volume it uses for calls, which can fade a held note out as if it were background hum.

Then make something of it

The note you sang goes into Brumm as a melody, in time and in key, inside a club track with a beat and a bass. No account, no upload: the note travels inside the link itself. Sing a whole line there, and it becomes an instrument.

Your voice stays on your phone: the tool reads it in the browser and keeps nothing. How the site counts visits.