What note is this?

What note is this sound? Things that have one

• A wine glass, tapped rings one clear note, lower for a bigger glass or one with water in it. Hold the phone close: it fades in a second. To tune a row of them, the wine glass tuner.

• A kettle whistling sits high, in the top octaves of a piano, and climbs as the steam comes harder. Tap once the whistle has settled. It reads up to about 4,000 Hz.

• A ding-dong doorbell strikes two metal bars, two notes. It names the one that rings longest, usually the dong.

• A bottle, blown across hums a low note: the air in the neck bounces on the air inside, like a weight on a spring. Pour in water and the note rises. Halve the air and it goes up six semitones, since the pitch follows one over the square root of the air's volume.

• A car horn with one horn reads well. Many cars sound two at once, a few notes apart; then you may get a low note the pair make together, not either one (why, below).

How to identify your voice pitch: the note you sing or speak

Tap, then hum ("mmm") or sing one vowel ("ah") at a comfortable pitch and hold it for a second or two. The reader takes the longest steady stretch of the three seconds, so sliding into the note or out of it doesn't count. Sing a word instead and you get the vowel you held longest, or no note if the pitch never settled. Your speaking pitch, vibrato and a clean reading: under the readout below.

Reading the answer: note, octave, cents, Hz

The big name is the nearest note on a piano, with its octave: A4 is the A above middle C (C4). Under it, how far off the sound is in cents (a hundred cents make one semitone) and its frequency in Hz. Within 5 cents it says dead on; within about 20 you'd call it in tune; further off, the line says which two notes it sits between. "Play the true note" plays the exact note for two seconds, so you can hear the difference.

The same letter an octave up or down sounds alike and carries the same name, at twice or half the frequency: a kettle on C7 (2,093 Hz) and a bottle on C3 (131 Hz) are both a C, four octaves apart. To watch your own voice live while you sing, use What note am I singing?

Your speaking pitch, vibrato and a clean reading

Your speaking pitch works the same way: say a long "mmm" at the level you talk at. Typical speaking voices sit around 90 to 155 Hz for adult men (about F♯2 to D♯3) and 165 to 255 Hz for adult women (about E3 to C4), after R. J. Baken, Clinical Measurement of Speech and Voice, 2nd ed. (2000), from Fitch and Holbrook (1970); plenty of voices sit outside that.

Why the note changes while you hold it

A voice wavers, and a vibrato swings the pitch up and down five to seven times a second, by half a semitone or more each way in trained singers (J. Sundberg, The Science of the Singing Voice, 1987). This page keeps a stretch only while it stays within half a semitone of where it settled, so a wide vibrato can split the note into short pieces or land between two notes. For the reading, sing the note straight; to watch the swing, use What note am I singing?, which reads live and keeps the last steady note when you stop.

For a clean reading

A quiet room with music, TV and fans off; the phone 15 to 30 cm from your mouth or the instrument; stop any reference note before you tap, or the microphone reads both. It works in Safari on an iPhone and Chrome on Android once the browser may use the microphone.

Is there a free online voice pitch analyzer? This page reads one held note; What note am I singing? reads your voice live and shows how far off each note is; the pitch detector reads a recording. All three are free, in the browser, with no account. Your lowest and highest notes: the vocal range test.

What note is this on the piano?

Press one key and hold it down; the reading takes the part that rings. Or find it by eye: the white key just left of each pair of black keys is a C, and the white keys run C D E F G A B from there. Middle C (C4, 261.63 Hz) is the 40th of the 88 keys and A4 (440 Hz) the 49th; the keyboard runs from A0 (27.5 Hz) to C8 (4,186 Hz).

A well-tuned piano can read some cents off near its ends, and that is the tuning, not a fault. Piano strings are stiff, so their overtones run a little sharp, and tuners stretch the octaves to match them, by tens of cents at the top and bottom of the keyboard (the Railsback curve, measured in 1938). The lowest keys sit under this reader's floor of about 60 Hz; more on that below.

What note is this on a guitar, a trumpet or a sax?

The tool names the note that sounds, which is not always the note on the page. Several instruments are written higher than they sound:

On a guitar, pluck one string and let it ring; a strummed chord has no single note. Each fret raises the string a semitone: on the low E string, fret 1 is F, fret 3 G, fret 5 A, fret 7 B, fret 8 C, and fret 12 is E again, an octave up. To tune rather than name, the guitar tuner follows the string live and plays each string's note when you tap it.

What note is this in a song or an MP3?

This page listens through the microphone, so you can play the song or a video on another phone, a laptop or a speaker and tap just before a held note. A voice or an instrument on its own reads well. In a full mix the voice, the chords and the bass sound together, and a one-note reader names whichever is strongest and steadiest, often the bass, or says there is no note. For the rest:

• A file (an MP3, a voice memo, a sample): the pitch detector reads a dropped file in the browser, six seconds from where the sound starts, one line at a time; audio files only, so for a video, play it out loud as above.
• The root note of a sample over its whole length: find the root note of a sample.
• Every note of a melody, in order: hum it into Hum to MIDI and get the notes as a MIDI file.
• The key of a line you can sing: What key am I singing in?

Is there an app that tells you what notes are being played?

For one note at a time, yes: any chromatic tuner, pitch detector or note identifier does it, this page included, in the phone's browser with nothing to install. Naming a chord, or every note of a band playing together, is a harder problem (polyphonic transcription); the apps and sites that attempt it mostly take a file, and on a dense mix they guess. No tool on this site names chords in a recording. Chords for my melody goes the other way: it suggests chords for a line you hum.

What is this music note? Reading it on sheet music

On the staff, the clef sets the letters. Lines and spaces count from the bottom.

Middle C sits on a short extra line just below the treble staff, or just above the bass staff. A sharp (♯) raises a note by a semitone, a flat (♭) lowers it, a natural (♮) cancels either; written next to a note it lasts to the end of the bar. A double sharp (𝄪) or double flat (𝄫) moves it two semitones. The sharps or flats at the start of each line, the key signature, hold until the key signature changes.

If the question is what a note's shape means, the shape is its length:

A dot after a note adds half its length. A tie (a curve joining two notes of the same pitch) adds their lengths into one note; three notes under a 3 (a triplet) share the time of two. Each note value has a rest of the same length, a silence: the whole rest hangs below a line, the half rest sits on one. To hear a note you read, play it on the tone generator.

Note names: letters, octave numbers, Do Re Mi

English names the twelve notes of an octave C, C♯, D, D♯, E, F, F♯, G, G♯, A, A♯, B; C♯ and D♭ are the same key on a piano, two names for one pitch. The number is the octave and changes at C: B3 is followed by C4. That is scientific pitch notation, with middle C as C4. Some software calls middle C C3 or C5, so when two readings disagree by an octave, compare the Hz.

Other languages name the same notes their own way. France, Italy, Spain and Latin America say Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Si for C D E F G A B. In German, H is B and B is B♭. In Indian music, Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Dha Ni are sung up from wherever the singer sets Sa, so they name steps, not fixed pitches.

In English-speaking schools Do Re Mi Fa So La Ti is usually movable: Do is the first note of whatever key you sing in, not always C. Older books use Helmholtz notation, where middle C is c′ and A4 is a′. Music software counts MIDI note numbers: 60 is middle C, 69 is A4 (the number in the formula further down).

Note frequencies at A4 = 440 Hz

Each octave doubles the frequency, and each semitone multiplies it by the twelfth root of 2, about 1.0595. Every note from C0 to B8: the note frequency chart.

How a note finder works, and where it goes wrong

Frequency is the measured number of repeats a second, in Hz; pitch is how high the ear hears it, and a note name is the label for a pitch. Doubling the frequency always sounds like the same step up, an octave, which is why the note names repeat.

A note is a sound that repeats. The reader looks for the time after which the waveform repeats itself, its period, and the frequency is one over that period. The note number is 69 + 12 × log₂(f ÷ 440) rounded to a whole number (69 is A4, 60 is middle C), and what is left over is the cents: 443 Hz is A4, 11.8 cents sharp.

This page reads its three seconds as if played an octave down, which lifts its ceiling to about 4,000 Hz; for anything below middle C it also reads them as recorded, down to about 60 Hz. It then takes the longest steady stretch and reads that again with everything above the note filtered out. On generated test tones, measured in October 2026, the reading was within 1 cent up to 1,000 Hz, about 3 cents at 2,000 Hz and 6 to 10 cents near 3,000 Hz; a glass tone that rang for only a fifth of a second still read within a cent. Real sounds add a room and a pitch that moves.

Where any one-note reader slips:

• Octave errors. A low note whose overtones are louder than the note itself (a bass string, a sound through a phone speaker) can read an octave high. Above about 4,000 Hz this page names the right letter an octave low.
• Two notes at once. A car with two horns on F♯4 and A♯4 (370 and 466 Hz, close to a ratio of 4 to 5) makes a waveform that repeats about 92 times a second, so the pair can read F♯2, a note neither horn plays (it did on a generated pair, October 2026).
• Overtones off the series. A voice or a string has overtones at 2, 3, 4 times its note. A glass, a bell or a metal bar doesn't: a doorbell's bar rings at about 2.76 and 5.40 times its note. That can pull a reading sharp (the second look filters it out) or make a church bell read its low hum note instead of the note you hear when it is struck.
• Below 60 Hz. The reader's floor is about 60 Hz. A bass guitar's low E (41.2 Hz) or the bottom octave of a piano reads as an overtone instead; the pitch detector has a slower pass down to 31 Hz (B0).

Sounds with no single note

A hiss, a rustle, running water, a door slamming, applause: noise never repeats itself, so there is no note to name, and the tool says so. A chord or a full song has several notes at once; a one-note reader like this names one of them, a low note they share, or none.

Tuned to another A: 442, 432, 415

The note names here are measured from A4 = 440 Hz, the international standard (ISO 16, 1975). Something tuned to A = 442 Hz reads about 8 cents sharp here, and a track at 432 Hz about 32 cents flat; the pitch detector can switch its A to either. Baroque ensembles tune to A = 415 Hz, 1200 × log₂(415/440) = 101 cents low, so their A reads here as G♯, almost dead on.

Then make something of it

The note 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. Your piano key or your doorbell, as a riff.

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