Vocal range chart, with room for your own range.

The six voice types on one pitch axis, from a low bass E2 to a soprano C6. Every chart of this kind is a picture. This one has a microphone underneath it, so you can put your own range beside the six instead of holding a phone up to the screen and guessing.

Bass
Baritone
Tenor
Alto
Mezzo-soprano
Soprano
C2C3C4C5C6

Reference ranges only. Run the test below and your own range is drawn on the same axis, directly above them.

Voice typeRangeIn hertzWidth
Bass E2 to E4 82.4 to 329.6 Hz 2 octaves
Baritone A2 to A4 110.0 to 440.0 Hz 2 octaves
Tenor C3 to C5 130.8 to 523.3 Hz 2 octaves
Alto F3 to F5 174.6 to 698.5 Hz 2 octaves
Mezzo-soprano A3 to A5 220.0 to 880.0 Hz 2 octaves
Soprano C4 to C6 261.6 to 1046.5 Hz 2 octaves

Two sweeps, about a minute each. Your browser will ask for the microphone. The audio is analysed in the page and never sent anywhere.

Why the bars overlap so much

The first thing people notice about this chart is that the six ranges are not six separate boxes. Neighbouring types share most of their span, and even a bass and a tenor share an octave. That is not sloppiness in the classification, it is the point of it.

These spans describe the notes a composer will write for a part, so that a choir assembled from ordinary people can sing it. They were never meant to partition singers into six bins. If your measured range covers parts of three of them, you have not failed the test, you have got the normal result.

Range is not tessitura, and the chart only shows range

Your range is every note you can produce. Your tessitura is the part of it where you can stay for a long time without paying for it. The chart above shows the first, and almost every decision about what you should sing depends on the second.

This is why two people with an identical bar on this chart can belong to different voice types, and why reaching an impressive extreme proves much less than it feels like it should. A note you can hit once is on your chart. A note you can sing a phrase on is in your voice.

Where these numbers come from, and how firm they are

The six spans are the ones that turn up unchanged from one textbook to the next, each a full two octaves. They are conventions rather than measurements, and other sources will place a boundary a tone or two either way. Nothing on this page depends on the exact edge, because the overlap is wide enough that a tone makes no difference to the reading.

The pitch measurement is a different matter, and there the number is meant to be exact. The detector is the same one behind the live monitor and the trainer. 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, and that failure is written up with the before and after measurements in my pitch detector read every note sharp. Its honest floor is 65.41 hertz, and when a sweep goes below it the page says so rather than printing a number it cannot defend.

A page for each type

If you are checking yourself against one type in particular, each has its own page with the same test and what separates it from the type it gets confused with. Bass, Baritone, Tenor, Alto, Mezzo-soprano, Soprano. The general range test measures you first and names the closest of the six afterwards.