Songs for an alto voice
264 songs whose melody stays inside F3 to F5 from start to finish, out of 324 measured. Allow three semitones of transposition either way and it becomes 296.
The alto list is long because a great deal of popular melody sits between F3 and F5, and that is worth knowing if you have been handed the alto part in a choir and told it is the boring one. What this page cannot tell you is which of these sit in your chest voice and which cross into your mix, and that difference matters more than the notes.
The list
Sorted by artist, showing 40 of 264. The two notes are where the melody spends its time, not the single highest and lowest note it touches.
| Song | Artist | Sits between |
|---|---|---|
| What's Up | 4 Non Blondes | B3 to D#5 |
| Nord Sud Ovest Est | 883 | E4 to D5 |
| Does Your Mother Know | ABBA | G3 to G4 |
| I'm a Marionette | ABBA | E4 to A4 |
| Name of the Game | ABBA | A3 to B4 |
| Tiger | ABBA | C#4 to D#5 |
| Waterloo | ABBA | C#4 to B4 |
| Highway To Hell | AC DC | E4 to E5 |
| Beautiful Life | Ace of Base | B3 to A4 |
| The Sign | Ace of Base | B3 to B4 |
| Janie's Got a Gun | Aerosmith | F#3 to C#5 |
| Born Country | Alabama | C#4 to C#5 |
| Y'a d'la rumba dans l'air | Alain Souchon | D#4 to D#5 |
| No Excuses | Alice in Chains | F3 to F#4 |
| Baby Baby | Amy Grant | B3 to C5 |
| Takin Care of Business | Bachman-Turner Overdrive | C4 to E4 |
| Feel Like Makin' Love | Bad Company | G#3 to G#4 |
| Ready For Love | Bad Company | A3 to A4 |
| Run With The Pack | Bad Company | C4 to A4 |
| Woman in Love | Barbra Streisand | A#3 to C#5 |
| One Week | Barenaked Ladies | C#4 to A4 |
| Copacabana | Barry Manilow | G#3 to C5 |
| Big Shot | Billy Joel | G3 to D4 |
| The Longest Time | Billy Joel | F3 to F4 |
| What's My Age Again | blink-182 | F#3 to F4 |
| Always | Bon Jovi | G3 to A#4 |
| Bad Medicine | Bon Jovi | C#4 to A4 |
| More Than A Feeling | Boston | G#3 to F5 |
| China Girl | BOWIE DAVID | D4 to E5 |
| Dans l'eau de la claire Fontaine | Brassens Georges | B3 to G4 |
| Guitar Man | Bread | D4 to E5 |
| From the Bottom of My Broken Heart | Britney Spears | A3 to B4 |
| American Honky-Tonk Bar Association | Brooks Garth | E4 to C#5 |
| I Got You (I Feel Good) | Brown James | G#3 to F4 |
| Walk in the Sun | Bruce Hornsby | F#4 to D5 |
| I'm On Fire | Bruce Springsteen | C#4 to B4 |
| The River | Bruce Springsteen | E4 to E5 |
| Heaven | Bryan Adams | B3 to G4 |
| Thought I'd Died and Gone to Heaven | Bryan Adams | B3 to A4 |
| Cold Contagious | Bush | B3 to E5 |
See all 264, and set your own two notes
Why a voice type is a bad way to pick songs
A voice type is not a range. It is where your voice sits happily and where it changes gear, and two people called alto can have their break in different places. A choir director put it to me more bluntly than that, and he was right. Using F3 to F5 as a filter is a starting point, not a verdict.
If you would rather work from your own two notes, the range test measures them in about a minute in the browser, then hands them straight to the full song list.
Where these numbers come from
They are read out of MIDI transcriptions from the Lakh MIDI Dataset, CC BY 4.0, by Colin Raffel. Human beings typed those melodies in by ear and about a fifth of the songs transcribed twice have versions that disagree by a whole octave. Only songs with two agreeing transcriptions and a range a voice can produce made it here. I also labelled all 214 acts by whether the lead singer is a man or a woman, and removed the 108 male-led songs sitting above B4, where no male pop singer spends a song. What is left still runs high on average for male voices, so a title here is a shortlist entry rather than a fact. The main page sets out the whole method.
Other voice types, bass, baritone, tenor, mezzo-soprano, soprano.