Songs for a soprano voice
163 songs whose melody stays inside C4 to C6 from start to finish, out of 324 measured. Allow three semitones of transposition either way and it becomes 243.
Slightly fewer songs than the mezzo list, and the reason is the bottom rather than the top. Plenty of popular melody dips below C4 for a line or two, which puts it outside this band even when the high notes are easy. Transposing up a tone fixes most of those.
The list
Sorted by artist, showing 40 of 163. The two notes are where the melody spends its time, not the single highest and lowest note it touches.
| Song | Artist | Sits between |
|---|---|---|
| Nord Sud Ovest Est | 883 | E4 to D5 |
| I'm a Marionette | ABBA | E4 to A4 |
| Tiger | ABBA | C#4 to D#5 |
| Waterloo | ABBA | C#4 to B4 |
| Highway To Hell | AC DC | E4 to E5 |
| Born Country | Alabama | C#4 to C#5 |
| Y'a d'la rumba dans l'air | Alain Souchon | D#4 to D#5 |
| Vivo Per Lei | Andrea Bocelli | D#4 to G5 |
| Donna con te | Anna Oxa | G4 to A5 |
| Takin Care of Business | Bachman-Turner Overdrive | C4 to E4 |
| Run With The Pack | Bad Company | C4 to A4 |
| One Week | Barenaked Ladies | C#4 to A4 |
| Wind Beneath My Wings | Bette Midler | G#4 to A5 |
| The Tide Is High | Blondie | F#4 to F#5 |
| Bad Medicine | Bon Jovi | C#4 to A4 |
| Cat People | BOWIE DAVID | C4 to G5 |
| China Girl | BOWIE DAVID | D4 to E5 |
| Aubrey | Bread | D4 to G5 |
| Guitar Man | Bread | D4 to E5 |
| American Honky-Tonk Bar Association | Brooks Garth | E4 to C#5 |
| 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 |
| Ci vuole un fisico bestiale | Carboni | D4 to C5 |
| Faccio I Conti Con Te | Carboni | C#4 to D5 |
| Mare Mare | Carboni | D#4 to D5 |
| Top of the World | Carpenters | G4 to A5 |
| Svalutation | Celentano | C#4 to A#4 |
| (If There Was) Any Other Way | Celine Dion | D4 to D5 |
| Mon reve de toujours | Celine Dion | B4 to C6 |
| Pour que tu m'aimes encore | Celine Dion | C4 to B4 |
| When I Need You | Celine Dion | G4 to A5 |
| Shoop Shoop Song | Cher | C4 to A4 |
| Daar gaat ze | Clouseau | F4 to D5 |
| One More Night | Collins Phil | D#4 to F5 |
| Baby Baby | Corona | D4 to D5 |
| Crying in the Rain | Culture Beat | D#4 to D5 |
| True Colors | Cyndi Lauper | C4 to G5 |
| Wij vieren feest | De Deurzakkers | E4 to C5 |
| The Legend Of Xanadu | Dee | G#4 to F#5 |
See all 163, 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 soprano can have their break in different places. A choir director put it to me more bluntly than that, and he was right. Using C4 to C6 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, alto, mezzo-soprano.