Interpretation of Sing & See™ displays


Pitch trace - this shows the pitch of the note you are singing. As you sing, the head of the line moves from left to right. If you sing higher in pitch, the line goes up, and if you sing lower, it goes down.

Spectrogram - The amount of energy in the sound at any particular frequency is indicated by the brightness of the colour. When singing vowels, most energy occurs at harmonics of the pitch frequency, so you see a series of horizontal lines (harmonics or voice partials) spaced equally above each other. The spacing of these lines is the pitch or fundamental frequency of the voice.

Some of the harmonics may be brighter than others, showing the formant resonances in the voice. The frequencies of these formants indicates the vowel identity. For instance, sing a series of vowels sustained on a single note (preferably a reasonably low pitch so that the harmonics are close together) and you will see that the pattern of brighter harmonics changes with the vowel.

Singer's formant - This is a strong resonance apparent in the spectrum of the voice at around 3000 Hz. This can be seen in the spectrogram as a band of bright colour between the 2 and 4kHz lines, or in the real-time spectrum as a high peak between the 2 and 4kHz lines. Note that the exact frequency of the singer's formant will depend on the voice type.