Am I an alto? Sing two notes and see.
Alto is a choral part before it is a voice type, and that difference explains most of the confusion around it. This page measures both ends of your voice, names them, and shows how much of the F3 to F5 span you cover. It runs in the tab and nothing is uploaded.
Two sweeps, about a minute each. Your browser will ask for the microphone. The audio is analysed in the page and never sent anywhere.
Step 1 of 2, your lowest note
Your result
One end of your range went past what this page can measure. Below 65 Hz, roughly a C2, the detector stops giving a number it can stand behind, so your real low note is at or below the one shown. It says so rather than printing a guess.
What the microphone actually heard
Low sweep. The dashed line is the note that was kept.
High sweep. The reading is drawn raw, before any octave correction, so you can see what the detector saw.
Open the trainer, level 1 free
Or keep it. This range test and all six levels of the trainer are two files that run with the internet switched off, 9.99 on the store. One price, once, nothing to unlock afterwards. Everything on this page stays free to use here, what you pay for is keeping it.
Same measurement, no type chosen in advance. It names the closest of the six for you.
Alto is a part, contralto is a voice
The word does double duty and it causes real trouble. In a choir, alto is the lower of the two upper parts, and it is filled by whoever can read it comfortably. As a solo voice type, contralto means something much narrower, and it is genuinely uncommon.
So a great many people who have sung alto for years are not contraltos. They are mezzo-sopranos who were put on the alto line because the choir needed one, and who then spent a decade never practising the top of their range. The measurement on this page reflects the voice you have trained, which is not always the voice you have.
What separates an alto from a mezzo-soprano
The reference spans are a fourth apart and overlap almost entirely, so the bottom note settles very little on its own. What tends to separate them is the top, and specifically whether the top is missing or merely unused.
A true contralto has genuine weight low down and the upper range stays comparatively modest even with training. A mezzo who has sung alto parts for years will often measure like a contralto and then gain most of an octave once she works on it, because the notes were never absent, only unpractised.
If your result says alto and the top of the sweep felt weak rather than blocked, that is worth retesting after a proper warm up, and worth comparing against the mezzo-soprano page.
Reading the low end honestly
The bottom of a female range is where this kind of test is easiest to fool, because the last few notes on the way down often turn into vocal fry. Fry has almost no pitch in it, a detector will either refuse it or invent something, and a range built on it is a range you cannot sing in.
Stop the descent at the last note that still has tone. It will give you a smaller number and a truer one, which is the trade this whole page is built on.
Getting a result you can trust
The test listens for a note you hold. A note that flashes past on the way through is not counted, because a single frame at the end of a sweep is almost always the detector slipping an octave rather than you singing. Hold each end for about three seconds and you will see it lock on.
- Sing an open ah, out loud. Humming is quieter and the low end of a hum is often too breathy to read.
- Start on a note that feels easy, then slide. Do not jump to the extreme, you will strain and the number will be worse.
- At the bottom, stop before it turns into a creak. Vocal fry has almost no pitch in it.
- Quiet room, microphone not too close. A phone at arm's length works fine.
Where the number comes from
The pitch detector is the same one that runs the live monitor and the trainer. It is a YIN detector with a correction pass, and it used to read every note sharp, by 2.6 cents at a concert A and by nearly 30 at the bottom of a bass range. That failure and its fix are written up with the before and after measurements in my pitch detector read every note sharp. An earlier version of the octave correction folded good readings away one frame at a time, and that one is written up in an octave correction that could not tell a glitch from a soprano.
Nothing is uploaded
The microphone stream is analysed inside the page. There is no server, no account, no upload and no cookie for this test. Close the tab and the whole thing is gone. The only file that ever leaves your machine is the result image, and only when you click the button that makes it.
The other five voice types
Each one has its own page, with the same test and the reference range for that type. Bass, Baritone, Tenor, Mezzo-soprano, Soprano. If you would rather not pick a type first, the general vocal range test measures your voice and names the closest of the six for you, and the vocal range chart shows all six drawn on one axis before you sing a note.