A voice quality test can’t tell you whether your voice is “good”, but it can measure how steady, clear and bright it sounds.
Hold a steady “ah” for a few seconds and this free test measures four things a microphone can pick up: how even your pitch is from one vibration to the next, how even your loudness is, how much breath or noise is mixed into the tone, and how bright or dark the sound is. You get plain-language readouts, not a grade, and you can record a second take to compare.
Voice Quality Test
Hold a steady “ah” for a few seconds and see four measurable parts of how your voice sounds: pitch evenness, loudness evenness, clarity and brightness. You get descriptions, not a grade.
- Find a quiet room and hold the microphone or phone about 20–30 cm (8–12 in) from your mouth.
- Press Start and stay silent for the short room check.
- Sing or say one steady “ah” at a comfortable pitch and medium volume, without vibrato, until the time bar is full.
Press Start and allow microphone access. Sound is analysed in your browser; nothing is recorded or uploaded.
Top bar: microphone level · bottom bar: time
Your voice readouts
- Pitch evenness (jitter-like)
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- Loudness evenness (shimmer-like)
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- Clarity (harmonics-to-noise)
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- Brightness (spectral balance)
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- Clear pitch found
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- Note held
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- Voice analysed
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- Voice above room noise
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- Browser sound processing
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What this take suggests
| Readout | Previous | This take | Change |
|---|
Descriptive readouts for practice. This is not a grade of how good your voice is and not a medical test, and it does not guess gender or age. Sing gently and stop if anything hurts.
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Related Tools
- Singing Grader
Want a score? Sing and get a quick 1–10 rating of your singing.
- Voice Frequency Test
See your voice in Hz and how deep or high it is.
- Pitch Accuracy Test
Hear a note, sing it back and see how many cents sharp or flat you are.
- Voice Type Test
Find out whether your voice fits soprano, alto, tenor, baritone or bass.
- Vocal Range Test
Find your lowest and highest singing notes.
- Singing Note Detector
See which note you are singing, live, while you sing.
What Is a Voice Quality Test?
“Voice quality” is the character of a voice apart from its pitch and loudness: whether it sounds clear or breathy, smooth or rough, bright or dark. Much of that is judged by ear, and listeners disagree. What a microphone can measure are a few acoustic features that voice researchers link to those impressions. They were developed for sustained vowels, which is why this test asks for one held “ah”. Your vocal folds make the sound; see how the vocal cords work for the basics.
This test reports four of those features, each measured on its own, and it does not add them up into one number. A single “quality score” would look precise, but it would depend mostly on how the parts are weighted, and on your microphone and room.
How the Test Works
- Choose a take length (4, 6 or 10 seconds) and press Start. Allow microphone access.
- Stay quiet for the short room check (1.5 seconds). The test measures the background noise so it can tell you if the noise limits your results.
- Sing or say one steady “ah” at a comfortable pitch and medium volume, without vibrato. The timer starts when your voice starts, and the first quarter of a second is skipped so the start of the note doesn’t count.
- While you hold the note, the display shows the note you are on and a live clarity reading. When the time bar fills, your readouts appear.
- Press Record another take to try again. The results then show this take next to your previous one, with the change for each readout.
For the most useful numbers, use a quiet room without much echo, keep the microphone or phone about 20–30 cm (8–12 in) from your mouth, and don’t move it during the take. If you compare takes, keep the same device, distance, vowel and pitch.
What Your Readouts Mean
| Readout | What it measures | How the test describes it |
|---|---|---|
| Pitch evenness (jitter-like) | How much the length of each vibration cycle changes from one cycle to the next, in % | Under 0.5% very even · 0.5–1% even · 1–2% some variation · 2% or more large variation |
| Loudness evenness (shimmer-like) | How much the strength of each cycle changes from one cycle to the next, in % | Under 3% very even · 3–6% even · 6–10% some variation · 10% or more large variation |
| Clarity (harmonics-to-noise) | How much of the sound is regular, repeating tone compared with noise such as breath or rasp, in dB | 20 dB or more very clear · 13–20 clear · 7–13 some breath or noise · under 7 mostly breath or noise |
| Brightness (spectral balance) | Energy from 1 to 5 kHz compared with energy from 50 Hz to 1 kHz, in dB (the “alpha ratio”) | Above −15 dB brighter-leaning · −15 to −25 middle · below −25 darker-leaning |
The bands are this tool’s own words for describing a number. They are not medical norms and they are not a scale from bad to good. For brightness in particular, neither end is better: loud, pressed singing and “ee” vowels read brighter, while soft, breathy singing and “oo” vowels read darker.
Under the four readouts you also see:
- Clear pitch found: the share of the time you were making sound in which the test found a clear, repeating pitch. Breathy, whispered or very rough sound lowers it.
- Note held: the note and pitch in Hz you held, for context. For your speaking pitch in Hz and how deep your voice is, see the section on depth below.
- Voice above room noise: how many dB your voice was above the room noise from the room check. The clarity reading can’t go much higher than this figure, so if they are close the test says your room is limiting the result.
- Browser sound processing: whether your browser reports echo cancellation, noise suppression or automatic volume control as on. The test asks for them to be off, because they change the sound it measures, but not every browser or phone does this.
The tool also warns you if the microphone was overloaded (clipping) or if your pitch moved by more than a semitone and a half, because these readouts are designed for one held note.
Is My Singing Voice Good?
No online test can answer that honestly for you. Whether a voice sounds good depends on the song, the style and the listener. A breathy tone that reads as “some breath or noise” here is a deliberate choice in a lot of pop and jazz singing, and a bright, ringing tone suits some music better than others. Low jitter and high clarity describe a steady, clean sustained vowel. They don’t tell you whether your singing moves people.
What the readouts can do is show you what changes when you change something: your warm-up, the pitch you choose, your breath, or your posture. If you want an overall rating of a sung phrase, try the Singing Grader, which rates your pitch centring, steadiness, clear-pitch time and range used on a 1–10 scale. For hitting the right notes, the Pitch Accuracy Test in the tools above tells you how many cents sharp or flat you sing.
How Deep (or High) Is My Voice?
Depth is mostly about pitch, and pitch is measured in hertz. This test shows the note you held only for context, and it doesn’t rate how deep your voice is. The Voice Frequency Test measures your average speaking or singing pitch in Hz and places it on a low-to-high scale. It is the right tool for “how deep is my voice”. The brightness readout here adds one more piece: two voices at the same pitch can sound darker or brighter depending on how their energy is spread across the frequencies.
Can You Improve Your Voice Quality?
Many parts of how your voice sounds respond to practice, though how much and how fast varies from person to person. Things singers commonly work on:
- A steadier tone: gentle breathing and sustained-note exercises. Start each session with vocal warm-ups for beginners.
- Clearer, less breathy sound: firmer (but not pushed) closure of the vocal folds and even airflow. A pitch in the middle of your range usually reads clearer than one at the edges.
- Tone colour: vowel shape and resonance change brightness. Learning how chest voice and head voice feel and sound is a good start.
- Vibrato: a relaxed, regular vibrato is a skill in its own right (see how to do vibrato), but hold a straight tone for this test. Vibrato raises the pitch-evenness number without meaning anything is wrong.
Take a few readings on different days, at the same pitch and with the same setup, and look at the trend rather than a single take. For keeping your voice in good shape, see these vocal health tips.
Accuracy, Limits and Privacy
- Your microphone, room and distance change the numbers. Research comparing phones with studio microphones found pitch and jitter fairly stable across devices, while shimmer, harmonics-to-noise and spectral balance shifted with the microphone. Echo in a room affects shimmer and spectral balance most. Compare takes made with the same setup, and don’t compare your numbers with someone else’s.
- Browser processing and Bluetooth headsets. Noise suppression, automatic volume control and low-quality Bluetooth microphones can change or smooth the sound. The test shows what your browser reports; very low sample rates (below 11 kHz) make the brightness readout unavailable.
- These are browser estimates, not lab values. The methods follow the published definitions of jitter, shimmer and harmonics-to-noise ratio, but they are computed differently from programs such as Praat, so the numbers are not interchangeable with clinical reports. In checks with synthetic voices, the pitch-evenness reading was close to the true value for lower voices and read low (as low as about half) at some higher pitches. The loudness-evenness reading tended to read somewhat low as well.
- Not a medical test. These measures are used in voice research, but none of them diagnoses anything on its own, and this tool gives no health verdict. It also doesn’t guess gender, age or anything else about the speaker. If your voice is hoarse for more than a couple of weeks, hurts, or changes suddenly, see a doctor or a voice specialist.
- Privacy: the test needs microphone access on a secure (https) page. Sound is analysed in your browser while you sing and is not recorded or uploaded by the tool. Your previous take is kept only on the page until you leave it. See the privacy policy for the wider site.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I check my voice quality?
Press Start on the test above, stay quiet for the short room check, then hold a steady “ah” for a few seconds. You get four readouts (pitch evenness, loudness evenness, clarity and brightness) with a short explanation of each.
Is there a voice timbre test?
Timbre, or tone colour, has no single measurable number. The brightness readout here measures one important part of it: how much of your sound’s energy sits in the higher frequencies. Clarity adds another, how much breath or noise is mixed into the tone.
What are normal jitter, shimmer and HNR values?
The Praat voice-analysis manual quotes reference thresholds of about 1.04% for jitter and 3.81% for shimmer, and around 20 dB harmonics-to-noise for a healthy sustained “a”. Those figures come from lab recordings and other software, so treat them only as rough context for this browser test. Your own trend across takes is more useful.
Why do my results change between takes?
Pitch, loudness, vowel, tiredness, distance from the microphone and room noise all move these numbers. Small differences between takes are normal, so look for changes that repeat over several takes with the same setup.
Why does my voice sound bad in recordings?
When you speak or sing, you hear your voice partly through the bones of your head, which makes it sound fuller and lower to you. A recording only captures the sound that travels through the air, the way other people hear you. The difference is normal and says nothing about your voice quality.
How is voice quality different from vocal range?
Vocal range is how low and high you can sing. Voice quality is about how the sound itself behaves at a given pitch: how steady, clear and bright it is. The vocal range test in the tools above measures range; this test measures quality features on one note.
Is this test the same as the singing grader?
No. The Singing Grader gives a 1–10 rating of a sung passage, mainly from how well you centre and hold your notes. This test gives no score. It describes the sound of one held vowel in four separate readouts.
Can this test detect a voice problem?
No. A breathy or uneven reading can come from your microphone, your room, the pitch you chose or simply your style. If you are worried about your voice, see a doctor or a voice specialist.