Free reference

A glossary for singers

Every term this app uses, defined in one sentence, with the room where you can go and see it.

Vocal teaching runs on borrowed words. Half of them arrived from three different traditions that never agreed with each other, and the rest describe a sensation rather than a mechanism. This page takes the 31 that turn up in this app — on the range result, in the studio readout, across the singer pages — and gives each one a single sentence, plus the place it shows up so the definition has somewhere to land.

Definitions only. No exercise is prescribed here — the warmups and the range test do that part, and none of this is medical advice.

Pitch and notation

The units every number in the app is quoted in.

Scientific pitch notationalso SPN · C4 notation: The letter-and-number way of naming one exact pitch, where C4 is middle C and the number ticks over at every C rather than at every A.; Every range figure in the app is written this way — your own low and high notes, and every singer's cited span. Open the range test →
Semitonealso Half step: The smallest step in Western tuning: one piano key to the next, black keys included.; Song transposition is counted in semitones, and warmup scores show the semitone where your accuracy starts to drop. Open song practice →
Cent: One hundredth of a semitone, the unit the pitch readout uses for how far off a note landed.; The studio's gauge shows cents live; under about five is inaudible to most listeners, twenty or more reads clearly as out of tune. Open the pitch studio →
Sharp and flatalso ♯ · ♭: Sharp means the note came out above the pitch you were aiming at, flat means below.; The studio's two pills say which side of the target you are on while you hold a note. Open the pitch studio →
Octave: The distance between a note and the next note with the same letter name — twelve semitones, at double the frequency.; Your range test reports the span in octaves, and the keyboard on the result marks each one. Open the range test →
Interval: The distance between two pitches, named by how many scale steps it covers — a third, a fifth, an octave.; Ear training plays intervals and asks you to name or sing them back. Open ear training →
Fundamental frequencyalso f0: The rate at which your vocal folds repeat their cycle, which is the pitch a listener hears.; Pitch detection estimates the fundamental from the waveform, then converts it to the nearest note plus a deviation in cents. Open the pitch studio →
Harmonicalso Overtone · Partial: One of the whole-number multiples of the fundamental that sound above every sung note and decide its colour.; The spectrogram draws one sung note as a stack of lines: the fundamental, then its harmonics. Open the analyzer →
A440also Concert pitch: The tuning standard where the A above middle C is 440 Hz, which is what every tool here uses.; The drone, the piano and the pitch detector are all referenced to A440, the same as the recordings you sing along to. Open tools →

Registers and the break

Different ways of setting up the vocal folds, and the seam between them.

Register: A way of setting up the vocal folds — length, thickness and how firmly they close — that handles one band of pitches well and gives out above it.; The range test's climb crosses at least one register change, and the singer pages describe voices as chest-dominant or head-dominant. Open the range test →
Chest voice: The thicker, shorter fold setup you speak in, so called because low notes buzz sympathetically in the sternum.; The range test asks you to stop pushing chest voice upward once the top starts feeling like a wall. Open the range test →
Head voice: The lighter, stretched fold setup above the break, which still rings at volume when the folds close firmly.; Warmup exercises that climb past your transition are asking for head voice rather than more effort. Open warmups →
Falsetto: A stretched fold setup with incomplete closure, which is why it sounds airy and resists being sung loudly.; The range test counts falsetto as part of your range, and singer pages flag voices whose top is falsetto rather than full. Open the range test →
Mixalso Mixed voice: The middle ground between chest and head — part fold setup, part vowel and resonance — where the transition can be crossed without a seam.; Singer technique notes describe voices climbing into mix at a named note instead of belting through it. Open the singer library →
Whistle register: A setup above head voice in which only a short section of the folds vibrates, giving a thin, flute-like tone.; The records page lists the whistle notes in the library; most voices never have one, and nothing depends on it. Open the records page →
Vocal fryalso Creak: The rattling, popping sound the folds make below the bottom of a sung range, with no steady pitch to it.; The range test asks you not to count fry as your low note — the floor is the lowest note you can hold clearly. Open the range test →
Passaggioalso The break · Transition zone: The two-to-four-note zone where the voice has to hand over from one fold setup to the next, which is where cracks and sudden thinning happen.; Slide slowly up through the zone and the pitch trace shows what the voice does at the transition; the same dip turning up at the same semitone every session is a passaggio rather than a limit. Open the pitch studio →
Beltalso Belting: Carrying a chest-dominant sound above the point where the voice would normally lighten, brightened rather than pushed.; Singer pages mark a belt note separately from the ceiling, because the top of a range is often not belted at all. Open the singer library →

Range and voice type

What a range figure does and does not claim.

Vocal range: The span between the lowest and highest notes you can sing with a clear, usable tone.; The range test reports yours as two notes and a span, and every singer page states theirs the same way. Open the range test →
Tessitura: Where a voice sits comfortably for most of a song, which is a different claim from the range it can reach.; Song fit is checked against your whole range, so a song can sit inside it and still spend every chorus in a part of the voice you would rather not live in — that is tessitura, and transposing is the fix. Open song practice →
Voice type: One of the eight conventional labels, soprano through bass, for the band a voice sits in and the weight it carries.; The range result names the type whose band overlaps your span most closely, and the singer library files every voice by type. Open the range test →
Transpositionalso Transposing: Moving a whole song up or down by a fixed number of semitones, which changes the key without changing the tune.; Song practice transposes the backing to land the melody where your voice is comfortable. Open song practice →

Breath, tone and measurement

The words for what the tools are actually watching.

Breath supportalso Support: Keeping the air pressure under the folds steady while the lungs empty — a management job rather than a strength one.; The sustain test scores steadiness alongside duration, because a long note that wobbles is not a supported one. Open breath control →
Vibrato: The small, regular pitch oscillation a relaxed sustained note settles into, usually a few times a second.; On the spectrogram, a steady ripple in the harmonic stack is vibrato; the stack jumping instead is a register change. Open the analyzer →
Resonancealso The vocal tract · The filter: The throat and mouth shaping the buzz from the folds into a vowel and a colour, without changing the pitch.; Hold one note and change vowel: the trace stays on the same line while the spectrogram redraws. Open the analyzer →
Singer's formant: A concentration of energy around 3 kHz found in many trained classical voices, and the standard explanation for carrying over an orchestra unamplified.; The tone panel draws that band as a gold column and reports its share of the plotted energy — a number to compare against your own takes, not a target. Open the analyzer →
Spectrogram: A display of every frequency present in your voice, plotted against time.; The analyzer draws one, so a bright or dark tone becomes something you can point at instead of describe. Open the analyzer →
Vocal dosealso Cycle dose: A measure of how much work the folds have done, counted in vibration cycles rather than minutes, because a minute sung high costs far more than a minute sung low.; The vocal-load panel counts cycles while you practice. Open the analyzer →
Drone: A continuously sustained reference pitch you sing against; when your note is slightly off, the two tones beat audibly.; The drone in Tools is the fastest way to hear intonation errors that a screen would have to tell you about. Open tools →
Lip trillalso Lip bubble: Blowing air through loosely closed lips so they flutter while you sing, which makes clear tone cheap for a cold voice.; Several warmups run on lip trills, and they are hard to blast through — the trill stops if you push. Open warmups →
Siren: A slow slide up and down through the voice on one vowel, without stopping at any note.; Warmup sirens are the standard way to find a register transition and then smooth it. Open warmups →

The long version

A sentence is enough to read a page; it is not enough to change how you sing. The Voice Atlas takes the vocabulary above a chapter at a time, and its first 3 are free to read:

How to read an entry — The anatomy of an atlas entry — what the cited range, the full-voice ceiling, the whistle flag and the sourced extremes actually claim, and how conservative those claims are.
Notes, octaves and the keyboard — Scientific pitch notation in five minutes — what C4 means, why F#5 and Gb5 are the same note, how octave spans are counted, and why identical voices get different figures.
Voice types in the wild — What the eight classification labels mean, why a pop mezzo and an opera mezzo are different claims, tessitura versus range, and how to guess your own type without a teacher.

The Measured Voice takes the same ground from the other side — how the voice works, then how to read your own numbers — and its first chapter is free too.