The simplest way to introduce Pitch Training is to imagine Duolingo for Singing. It’s a game that imitates the singing practice as if you would go to a singing lesson.
How does a typical voice lesson look like?
- You usually start from a soft vocal warm-up (like lip trills or humming)
- Then you sing scales along the piano going up and down through your voice range
- At the end you pick a song and practice singing it
The teacher normally gives you feedback on the spot, highlights your week and strong spots, offers tips and maybe explans some theory behind it. They also play the piano for you during the whole lesson. Can you do all of that by yourself?
Pitch Training was designed to simulate the practice in a realworld singing class.
While there are a lot of exercises to start your practce available for free on Youtube, the rest of the lesson is a bit more tricky. This is what Pitch Training offers to help with it:
- A virtual piano imitating the teacher playing the exercise, adjustable to your range
- A voice visualisation that uses your mic to show if you are on pitch and in tempo
This is how it looks like:
As you sing through the melody, the program tracks your performance and gives you a score.
It’s a game like Duolingo
If you want to make progress, especially in singing, you need to practice regularly. To make sure the practice doesn’t get boring the exercises are packed as the levels in the game:
Simpler levels are more suitable just to practice your pitch-matchng and warming-up the voice. As you progress the game offers more sequences to learn different scales, work on your range extension and voice agility.
The game allows you to track you vocal range and pitch accuracy progress.
If you are a competitive kind every week there is a competition that might bring your name to the hall of fame!
Who is it for?
No matter how good this tool might be it can not replace a real teacher. It might be helpful if:
- You are looking for a temporary cheaper alternative to a vocal teacher;
- You have a teacher, but need to do your home practice on top of that;
- You prefer to study by yourself.
The optimal combination would be going to the teacher once a week and using the Pitch Training for your daily practice.
While the tool is more focused on beginners to help them master the pitch and extend the range, it can also be useful for more experienced singers who want to warm-up and do not play or do not have an instrument at hand.
In the end, the teachers might use the tool to give homework to their students.
What’s behind the paywall?
The game starts with a pitch accuracy test that helps you assess your starting point. Then you will have to create an account and will be let to try out the first stage of Level 1. From there on the game is paid:
Each next level is basically is a new warm-up melody catered to practice different singing techniques. Each of this exercises can be used in 3 different modes.
The basic one just gives you one run of the exercise and measures how many notes you hit. You can try it for free.
Let’s talk about hard and practice modes.
Hard mode
The hard mode is designed to practice your singing memory. The interface looks very similar to the basic mode, but there are some differences:
- You do not hear the melody as you sing
- The melody loops and goes up the scale indefinetely
- When you miss the pitch 3 times the game ends
Those misses are displayed as hearts on the screen:
Once you sing as many notes as you can you can see how you compare to other players. Each level has it’s own leaderboard with the top results of the month:
Practice mode
This is the main mode of the game where most of the users spend time… practicing! This is the interface layout:
When you click the big “Play” button in the center of the screen the melody will start looping, going higher and higher until you cover your whole range. There are a lot of settings that you can twist to adjust the tool to your needs:
- Make the melody go up the scale, down the scale, loop it or make it go back and forward within your range;
- Limit the practice to your range or work on your extension;
- Record yourself and replay the voice together with the pitch-detection visuals;
- Turn on and off the piano as you sing;
- Choose between piano and guitar sounds;
- Adjust the tempo (BPM).
What’s the science behind it?
Research shows that our ability to sing in tune requires humans to develop the following abilities:
- Musical ear – after hearing two notes you can tell which one is higher
- Musical memory – you can memorize sequences of notes
- Singing muscles control – you know which muscles in your body you should move to change the pitch
- Singing coordination – puting it all the above together:
- Use musical memory to keep the melody you want to sing in your head
- Use singing muscles to produce the sound
- Hear yourself and use your musical ear to check if you are on pitch, if no:
- Use singing muscles to adjust the pitch you produce
The picture below illustrates it in scientific terms:
Basic Pitch Training mode is designed to develop your musical ear, singing muscles control, and coordination.
The hard mode is specifically tackling music memory development.