Vocal range test: find your voice type.

At a glance

How to test your vocal range

Use headphones off and a quiet room, with the phone or laptop an arm's length away. Warm up for a minute first, a few gentle slides and hums, because a cold voice gives a smaller range than you really have. Press Start, then sing an easy note in the middle of your voice and step down a note at a time, holding each for a moment, until you reach the lowest note you can still sing clearly rather than growl. Then go back to the middle and climb the same way to the highest note you can sing without straining. Include your falsetto or head voice if you use it when you sing. The live note shows what the page hears, the keyboard fills in as notes count, and Start over clears it.

Do not push for an extra note. A note you can only squeeze out once is not part of the range you sing with, and forcing high notes is how voices get hurt. The low end is similar: the rattling vocal fry below your real bottom note has no steady pitch, so it does not register here, which is deliberate.

How it decides a note counts

The pitch is read with YIN, the same detector as this site's tuner, which is checked to within a cent on test tones. Each reading, 20 a second, is compared with the note nearest to it. A note counts once your voice has stayed on it for 300 ms, the average of those readings within 50 cents of the note, a quarter of a semitone. Vibrato swings further than that on its peaks, so a hold carries on through swings of up to 75 cents. That is long enough that sliding through a note, a voice crack or a stray squeak does not count, and short enough that any note you meant to sing does.

The check behind this page feeds that logic known pitches and requires all of these: two held notes give exactly their range; a 250 ms blip an octave above does not count; a glide of six semitones a second counts nothing on its own; ±60 cents of vibrato at 5.5 Hz holds the note; a note 30 cents sharp still counts as itself. It also drives the live page with a scheduled tone through a stand-in microphone: a held A2, a fast glide up two octaves, a 150 ms A5 and a held G4. The page must read A2 to G4, baritone.

Voice types and what they mean

The classical voice types are defined by range, from low to high: bass about E2 to E4, baritone A2 to A4, tenor C3 to C5, alto or contralto F3 to F5 (a countertenor sings much the same notes in head voice), mezzo-soprano A3 to A5, and soprano C4 to C6. Those are the spans most choir and singing-teacher charts give; trained singers often extend a few notes either side. The page matches your range to the type it overlaps most and, when two fit about equally, to the one whose middle is nearest yours, and it names the runner-up too, because many voices sit between two types.

Range is only part of what makes a voice type. A teacher also listens for tessitura, where your voice sounds and feels best for long stretches; for timbre, how dark or bright it is; and for where your voice changes register. Two singers with the same lowest and highest notes can be a baritone and a tenor. Treat the result as a starting point, and as a practical answer to "which songs, in which key". If a song sits too high, the pitch shifter moves it into your range, and the key finder tells you what key it was in.

Using a recording instead

If the microphone is awkward, or you want to test a recording you already have, open "Or use a recording" and drop a voice memo of yourself singing single notes, low to high. The page runs the same detector over the whole file, every hundredth of a second, through the same 300 ms rule. It works on a solo voice; a song with backing music will pick up the instruments' notes too, so use the vocal remover first.