Steady Pitch

Steady Pitch listens to your voice or your instrument and tells you, note by note, whether you are in tune. It runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is installed, and the audio never leaves your machine.

Play it right here in the page above. Allow the microphone, sing a note, and watch the reading.

What it actually does

Most tuners answer one question, what note is this. That is not the question a singer asks. A singer asks how far off am I, in which direction, and does it hold. Steady Pitch answers that one. It shows the note, the deviation in cents, and the shape of the line over time, so you can see a wobble that a needle would hide.

Why the detection is different

Naive pitch detectors read a low vowel one octave too high, because the second harmonic can be louder than the fundamental. Mine used to do it too. I found it, I wrote down why, and I fixed it in two passes rather than one, because a single pass that corrects each frame against its own last output is a ratchet, it has no way to discover that its reference was wrong.

The bench that guards this behaviour runs fifty two checks on synthetic and recorded signals. On the eight reference cases the delivered reading lands at zero cents of error.

What is in this free build

• The live monitor, unrestricted, with the deviation trace
• A vocal range test that names the two ends of your voice and its width in octaves
• Five of the thirty guided exercises

What the full version adds

• All thirty guided exercises, from single sustained notes up to interval work
• A single HTML file you keep, it works with no network at all
• No account, no subscription, no expiry

The full version is one file, yours forever, and you decide what to pay for it, including nothing. The rest of this shelf charges between fourteen and twenty dollars a month, or two hundred and fifty five for a lifetime seat.

Who it is for

Singers who cannot tell whether they are flat or whether the room is. Wind and string players working on intonation. Teachers who want a student to see the note rather than be told about it. Anyone who has been told they are tone deaf and would like a measurement instead of an opinion.

Requirements

A browser with microphone access. Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari all work. It is quieter on a phone than on a laptop, because phone microphones apply their own processing, so a laptop or an external microphone gives a cleaner reading.