Software for Singing Improves Pitchy Voice

Pitchy voice problems are now widespread and quickly identifiable by even novice music listeners. The primary cause of pitchy voice is that a singer can not correctly hear his or her own voice. This is because the sound waves that reach the eardrum are primarily going through the head rather than traveling through the air. So, everyone else hears the singer with sound waves coming out of their mouth and traveling through the air to their ears. The singer hears sound waves that are distorted by passing through bone, and varying densities of tissue. People who are born with good pitch are lucky that their physical structure supports them. People with chronic pitchy voice, even after training, usually have a head anatomy that does not support hearing themselves.

For people in the later category, it seems nearly impossible to improve their pitchy singing. However, new software for singing has shown to remedy this problem by literally entraining a singer to sing on pitch. The training process is enabled by using real time bio visual feedback in addition to audio feedback. First, if a singer with chronic flat pitch puts on headphones and sings into a microphone, their pitch accuracy improves as the volume in the headphones increases. Headphones have shown to correct as much as fifty percent of pitch issues, but wearing headphones only illustrates the problem and is not helpful when a singer must perform on stage or in a choir. In part two of this series, we will discuss the details of how software for singing corrects pitch problems so that a singer can sing on pitch in any setting.

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