How should I use Vocular?
To get the best results out of Vocular, please do the following:
- Find a quiet room with no echo and no one else speaking.
- Tap the V button to start taking a sample. The red band should start to jump out as it detects frequencies.
- Speak for about 30 seconds. Try and do this naturally, as if talking to a friend.
- Once you feel you’ve said enough. Tap the button again to end the recording. The V should start pulsating as it calculates your results.
What results should I want to get from Vocular?
Barack Obama, Alec Baldwin, Jason Momoa, Patrick Stewart, Morgan Freeman and Gerard Butler all speak with a median pitch of ~96Hz
Things are more surprising when vocal variance is considered though. On the one hand, men with monotone voices are seen as being more dominant and report more sexual partners. On the other hand, a more varied voice seems to be more engaging. So there’s a strange ‘bedroom and boardroom’ effect – you want to be able to ramp up the variety when giving a speech, but cut it down on dates.
Can people really deepen their voices?
Yes. Margaret Thatcher most famously did, as you can see in this YouTube clip.
Actors like Morgan Freeman and Matthew McConaughey have also talked about the same thing. In fact, Freeman cited learning to lower his pitch as the first major step he took towards becoming an actor.
How do you deepen your voice?
I’ve written a pretty extensive list of methods in this post – but to give a bitesize version of it, you want to stretch and strengthen your neck muscles, breathe from the diaphragm and learn to speak with a descended larynx.
But isn’t this all about the length and thickness of your vocal chords?
Not really. It’s true that the length and thickness of your vocal chords do affect the depth of your voice, but these are not the only factors. If they were, you’d be unable to change the pitch of your voice at all, higher or lower.
Tension is also a big factor in determining your voice depth. This is why your morning voice is usually significantly deeper than your voice at, say, 3pm – your neck is relaxed from hours of sleep. And the good news is, this is something you can learn to control with a range of techniques. But don’t take our word for it, take Morgan Freeman’s.
There’s also a psychological point that needs to be made here. Most guys aren’t speaking at the baseline of their vocal chords. Through a desire to seem friendly or non-threatening, people adopt a higher tone of voice in social situations, and this voice becomes ‘stuck’ over time, displacing their more natural one. So a lot of it boils down to bad habits, but again, listen to Morgan Freeman…
This isn’t to say that there’s no physiological limit on the depth of your voice – there is. Jennifer Aniston is never going to sound like Barry White (no matter how much she dearly wants to). But what this does say is that the determinist idea that ‘you’re stuck with the voice you have’ is equally wrong.
Does Vocular accept responsibility for any injury sustained in using the app?
Why does my voice sound deeper to me than Vocular says it is?
There are three reasons for this. Firstly, when you hear your voice as you speak, you hear it not only through your ear drums (as everyone else does) but through vibrations in your skull, which makes your pitch sound lower to you than it does to everybody else.
Secondly, your physical size may have something to do with it. A study found that taller and heavier men are less capable of judging voice depth compared to less physically imposing individuals
Why don’t I sound like any of my matches?
How does the voice depth calculation work?
In most scenarios, the voice depth calculation works simply by taking your lowest frequency of which they are 5 or more instances. Thus, your voice depth result is the deepest significant frequency you speak at.
However, there are complications. Many women speak with a register called ‘vocal fry’ – this is that low, creaky sound, particularly common in young American women like Kim Kardashian or Anna Kendrick. Vocal fry occupies a territory between 75Hz and 110Hz for women, and so it needs removing from the results. If we didn’t, a lot of women would get reported as having voices as deep as Morgan Freeman.
So, if a voice has an average frequency above 130Hz, it’s assumed that vocal fry will interfere with the analysis, and frequencies below 112Hz are excluded. This works in most cases but there are still two shortcomings: it doesn’t always remove vocal fry (for example, if the person’s average pitch is below 130Hz) and it sometimes means that men who speak with a high vocal variance get reported as having a voice depth of 112Hz, when it’s probably deeper.
How are the celebrity matches calculated?
I’m a man with a deep voice. Why do I match with some women more than some men?
Why are people as famous as Johnny Depp, Christian Bale, Tom Hardy etc. excluded from the database?
The idea of the celebrity matches is to give users around the globe some kind of grounding of their voice depth – it’s more helpful to know that your top match is Barack Obama than it is to see that your voice depth is 80Hz, at least in the beginning. This is why actors make up most of the celebrities in the database; people around the world are familiar with their voices, and immediately have a point of reference when they see their faces.
Is it app available in Android mobile. Please provide this Android users also.
Hey Chandra,
We are going to. Stuart (developer and co-founder) is currently on holiday but we’ll be bringing out an Android version when he gets back. Thanks
i hope android version launch soon 🙂
By when can we expect the ‘attractiveness’ and ‘breathy’ metrics ?
Also please explain what does it mean if my Voice Depth is above 100hz and the musical note classification is Bass. One more thing I was unable to use for my understanding is that (C-1, C-2) thing.
My results for most of the time show a Voice Depth 91-97 Hz and classification says deeper than average, while the note is Baritone (C-1). I can’t understand what to conclude from these data.
I’ve tried checking description and it doesn’t explain much.
The email ID got wrong, due to glitches.
It’s amulyamishra163@gmail.com
Hi Amulya, I’m not sure. I’m doing a PhD on this at the moment, but it seems plausible that we might need several attractiveness ratings for different languages/countries.
Not sure about the bass thing, although you shouldn’t be listed as bass if your voice is above 100Hz. What was the reliability for that? In any case though, 91-97 is fairly deep.
Hey, so I scored between 71-75 hz which is clearly very deep. Should I try to give my voice a higher pitch? I’am asking because it says around 95 hz is most optimal with Obama, Morgan Freeman ect.
Great app by the way!
Hey Erik,
So studies that look at pitch and attractiveness tend to find that the most attractive ones are around the 90s – but the interesting thing is that pitch isn’t such a big issue. It’s significant – but articulation, huskiness and a lack of nasality are better predictors of which voices are most attractive. The overall plan with Vocular is that we’ll measure all kinds of other parameters that people can improve on – I even want to build an algorithm which tells the user how attractive or authoritative their voice is. Ideas like that are probably quite a long way off, but if you want to speed up the process, it’d be good if you could leave us a decent review. This means we get bumped up the Apple chart, which means more sales and more time and money we can put into the app. And let me know if there’s anything you want me to add too.
Thanks, James
When is the android app coming? I want to pay for it (:
Haha, good! It’ll be out this month. I think the development’s almost done, then there’s the testing which shouldn’t take much more than a few days. I’ll let you know when it’s out.
Just came across this, anxious to try the Android app when it gets released!
Is there any sort of waiting list or notification for when it does release?
Well you’ll be able to soon. We’re working on it at the moment, so it should be about within 1-2 weeks. I’ll send you a message when it’s here.
Hello, are there some problems with the Android release? I see your last comment is wrote in July, today is October 1st…
Yes, I would also love to hear more about the expected android version.
Oh yeah, it’s already out. Enjoy!
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.verbera.vocular
What does voice reliability mean?
Hey Mike, the reliability effectively refers to how much voice data was recorded in a sample – the number in the brackets refers to how many instances of pitch we were able to detect. We check other things too. If there’s too much of one particular frequency, it’s likely that a car engine or some machine in the background has corrupted your data.
Any clue as to Chris Hemsworths vocal range? I’m surprised he’s not on here.
Hi Joseph, yeah, I left him off initially because he’s Australian but more famous for doing British/American accents, although I don’t think that judgement makes much sense in hindsight. I’ve been editing a load of new voices lately, including his, so they’ll be added to a new version of the app soon.
so this app doesn’t help me/ give me tips to lower my voice. It only tracks my progress? Just making sure I understand it, which I will still use it regardless
Hey Johnathan,
Yeah, I wrote about the techniques that worked for me here: http://vocularapp.com//how-to-get-deeper-voice/
I initially shied away from adding them to the app though, since I’m not a voice coach, just a linguistics grad who can code. You’re right to ask though, and I think I really ought to add some tailored advice to the analysis. In the meantime, just write to me if there’s anything you want to know.
Hi,
Is there info somewhere about how many “classifications” there are and the ranking/ordering of the classifications? – for example: is mid deep lower than fairly deep, etc
Thanks!!
Haha, good question. I actually had to look this up myself, so yeah, good question…
Turns out we have 16 classifications. Mid deep is higher than fairly deep – it’s halfway between average and deep. I should probably find some better descriptions for some of them – but they’re really just there for people who are getting to grips with the app and don’t understand where their voice falls within the general populace. Once you’ve used it a couple of times, I’d rely on the numbers and matches instead. Also, with 16 classifications, it’s tough to think of decent descriptions for some of them. Open to suggestions though.
Hi, maybe I’ve asked to much: you can answer to my private mail if you don’t want to in the official comments. But I’d really like to know what those numbers in the x axis of the distribution graph stand for.
Thanks again for the app!
Hey Angelo, I’ve just checked my inbox and rather strangely I don’t seem to have any mail from you (just in case it seemed like I was ignoring you). Sure, the numbers on the x-axis are effectively the number of times a frequency was detected, so if you have 50 on the x-axis and 90Hz on the y-axis, the app was able to detect 90Hz 50 times in your speech. It’s a basic histogram really, just mirrored to make it look nicer. Hope that helps!
Does the app also look at the words spoken per minute (wpm) to gauge which celeb your voice resembles, or is it strictly based on tonality?
It’s just based on frequency for now. I‘d like to add rate of speech too, although we’d probably do it by syllables per second.
I really like the app. But I’d be curious as to where you sourced your vocal samples of these celebrities, because I question their validity. For example, George Clooney uses a very deep voice in some of his movies. However, those are acting roles and I doubt that’s his normal voice, because during interviews his pitch is higher. I find interviews to be much more accurate. For example, an interview with Alan Rickman clearly showed the depth and timbre of his voice dwarves Clooney, Damon, or Brad Pitt. But on your scale, supposedly those three have deeper voices than him. But their voices during interviews are not even close to Rickmans’s overall depth. Very interesting. While I love this app, I realize it has limitations and for all of us, celebrities included, our pitch will change depending on the situation. Did you select movie scenes where each celebrity used their deepest voice you had found or was it random, aggregate, etc. Keep up the good work!
Hey Shayme, thanks for your message. It’s interesting you say that, in that I actually sourced all of the celebrity samples from interviews. I’d download a high quality recording from YouTube, then edit out any interviewer questions, silly voices, coughs, sneezes until I was left with nothing but a clip of the person in their normal speaking style.
I do share your feeling about Alan Rickman though, and I can think of a couple of explanations for this. The first is that Vocular basically equates a deep voice with a low-pitched voice, whereas in reality there are other features that influence how deep a voice sounds. Richard Ayoade, for example, has a low-pitched voice, but because it’s famously nasal, it sounds whiny and high. There’s also a feature called ‘formant density’, which basically refers to how closely together a speakers’ frequencies are grouped. This is something that makes a voice sound more masculine – I have a feeling Jon Hamm and Armie Hammer both have rather ‘dense’ voices – but Vocular only really takes the fundamental frequency into account. So there’s room for improvement to expand the app and maybe even use machine learning to create an algorithm that calculates how deep a voice is.
A second explanation might be that we’re just terrible judges of this kind of thing. Men, especially tall or heavy men, are less attuned to voice depth. I noticed this when compiling the database actually. Often I’d expect someone like Ben Affleck to have a deep voice and find his was up in the 130s, then I’d expect Cumberbatch’s voice to be pretty high, only to find that it’s one of the lowest on record. Women have always been far better judges of this in my experience.
Great app, loving it.
When you say men should aim for 96 Hz – Do you mean voice depth or average? These two figures are always quite different.
Also, would you be able to list George Clooney on the celebs list?
Thanks,
Hemal
Hey Hemal, thank you. Yeah, average is what I mean really. Median’s probably a better measure actually, because it’s less influenced by anomalous frequencies.
Clooney should already be there too. He was actually one of the first we added. Can you send me a screenshot if he’s not on your version though?
Aah so he is! Probably because I have never got close to his voice I never saw him lol.
Thanks for your reply.
Sorry, I just had one more question I forgot to ask. Where it analyses the vocal fry, mine usually comes out “quite high”. Should we aim to reduce that. i.e. is lower vocal fry better? Thanks again
Amazing app. Always wanted to get a deeper, huskier, sexier masculine voice.
Any idea if you will be able to train a man to speak with a “sexier’ voice? Can you program AI to detect if voice is breathy and husky or sharp? Right now it checks the pitch and tone, but there should probably be a way to train the program to check the most “sexiest” voices and then see if learning algorithm can fine tune your voice and train it to match that ideal a bit more.
That’s actually exactly what I’m planning to do. We’ll probably have things like huskiness and nasality on the app sooner, since you don’t need machine learning to detect them, but I really want to add more ‘subjective’ features to the app too.
Do your vocal classifications refer to men and women? So if a woman gets average does that mean her voice would actually be low for a woman?
Hey Diana, I thought that I’d the user selected ‘Female only’ matches or got a result that was unambiguously in the female range, it would show a classification that applies only to women. I’ve just tested and it looks like the first part of that doesn’t apply though. I’ll add that to the changes. Is there a particular frequency you’d like to know about? 200 Hz tends to be about average for women.
This seems to be written with men far more in mind.
Yeah, it’s partly because most of the literature on voice depth concerns only male voices, so there’s more for me to say about them – but also 85% of our users are male and people who search “how deep is my voice” are overwhelmingly reported as male, so I guess I ended up writing this more with a male audience in mind. Are there any parts you’d like me to expand on for women? Or new questions you’d like me to ask?
It would just be interesting to have a bit on how to raise pitch as well, or at least don’t write it to assume that we’re all boys.
I actually read through the Q&A after reading your comment and there is a section about female voices, so I don’t think it’s fair to make it sound like I’ve just ignored women. A lot of the questions and answers are gender neutral too.
Fair point on making the voice higher, isn’t this just something you can do without instruction though? If you turn on the Pitch Tracker in Settings, you’ll be able to see your voice pitch as you speak. When I do this, I can raise my voice to the female range (without going falsetto) quite easily. I’m not sure how best to explain what I’m doing with my larynx to make my voice higher though, it’s like I’m pushing it upwards slightly
I don’t actually know who most of these celebrities are. You should add people who are really famous singers, like the Beatles or whatever.
The problem with that is that Vocular only works on people’s speaking voices – and not many people actually know what a lot of famous singers sound like. So John Lennon or Paul McCartney might be a good shout, but even someone like Madonna wouldn’t be easily identified from an audio clip of her speaking in her normal voice.
Huh. I’m kinda surprised that it won’t work for singing.
Yeah, it’s just the spoken voice. When people sing, they reach a much, much wider range of frequencies (and this changes from song to song) so the voice matching algorithm would basically be meaningless.
Can you include anime voice actors in the database?
Hi L, maybe as some sort of expansion option, but I actually don’t know what any anime actors sound like and I’m not sure many people do. One tough side of the app has been finding celebrities whose voices are internationally known.
Great app! One major feature request:
Where your voice lies on the distribution for male and female for each of these stats. E.g. Voice Depth 90Hz (20th percentile men / 5th percentile women, where lower is deeper), and same for all of the other stats.
In its absence, can you share a link to the mapping between classifications, average frequency, and male/female distributions?
Also, are all the frequencies measured the “fundamental frequency”? E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_frequency
Hi there,
Thank for the interesting app. I have a suggestion. It would be nice to have a comparison with singers voices rather than actors. These last ones are often dubbed, singers are not… hopefully! ?
Cheers,
E
Hi Emiliano, yeah, I’m actually making a list of new voices to add to the app right now if you want to send some suggestions. Unfortunately though, singers are a difficult one since people often don’t know what their speaking voices sound like. Everyone knows who Madonna is, but very few people could identify her voice without any visual clues. But, if you know any singers with well-known speaking voices, I’d be happy to add them.
Cole Sprouse would be a good one to add as an example of a male with a higher voice. Lots of young people will know his voice.
Why does my voice sound deeper at 100Hz than (for instance) Edward Norton’s at 89Hz? What other factors are at play besides pitch?
I think nasality is the answer to that one. Richard Ayoade has a strikingly deep voice when you analyse its pitch, but because most of it comes out of his nose, it sounds high and whiny instead. I’m trying to find some way of objectively measuring nasality right now, but it’s difficult to automate. I’ll see what I can do though…
Wow, thanks for the quick reply! My voice isn’t nasal so that makes sense.
But my voice also sounds deeper than Gerard Butler who (correct me if I’m wrong) doesn’t have a nasal voice. I think my voice doesn’t have much warmth. Any idea why that might be? Is it something you could measure?
Does your voice sound deeper than Armie Hammer’s? His is an interesting one to me because, in terms of pitch, it’s deep – but I’d say he has one of the deepest voices I’ve heard. Not sure why, I had guessed that formant frequencies might be the answer, but they don’t seem to really correspond to anything other than the vowels in a recording…
My voice doesn’t sound as deep as Armie’s and is not really similar (unfortunately). My top match on the app was Richard E Grant at 72% if it helps!
My voice “booms” but doesn’t have any warmth like Armie’s.
How deep is 100Hz anyway? Could I be speaking at a higher pitch than is natural for me without realising it and it comes through in the booming quality?
I’m a girl and the app says my voice depth is 112Hz but my average is 174Hz and my median is 183Hz. So do I have a high or a deep voice?
For older people like Queen Elizabeth II, did you use their younger voices or their current voices?
Hi Noelle, yeah, generally if they’re old in the picture, it’s their current voice. So Clint Eastwood is young but the Queen isn’t.
Thanks 🙂 Could you add Queen Elizabeth II when she was young? She was criticised for her high voice when she was young and she purposely lowered it. It was included in the Crown as well!
Oh, that’s interesting. Yeah, I’ll see if I can find a good recording. How young do you want? I should probably find a longer audio for her current voice too. Let me know if there are other female voices you want me to add. The database could do with more.
I believe she changed her voice around the late 1950s / early 1960s. This recording is quite good: https://youtu.be/S2pgmKeGEZg
I think Amanda Seyfried, Olivia de Havilland, Grace Kelly and Katharine Hepburn would be great additions 🙂
My voice “booms” but doesn’t have any warmth like Armie’s.
How deep is 100Hz anyway? Could I be speaking at a higher pitch than is natural for me without realising it and it comes through in the booming quality?
I have the same problem. My voice is 185 Hz but it sounds deeper to me :/
Would it be possible to analyse the tones/overtones in each voice to better match to celebrities?
Hi Lucy, I’ve had a look at formant frequencies recently, if that’s the kind of thing you mean. Unfortunately, they don’t correspond to much though. F4 (the fourth formant frequency) is a fairly good predictor of gender, especially when twinned with pitch, but it doesn’t seem good for much else…
Is it possible to feed an audio sample directly into the app for analysis?
Not yet, although I could do it for you if you wanted to send me the audio? No worries if not though
Hi, it was Gabriella Wilde’s voice in these clips I wanted to analyse.
https://youtu.be/RNhLhMFHtxA
https://youtu.be/l-il3b0PUIY
Thanks!
Why is my voice classified as higher when I speak around 185 Hz and the average for women is 200 Hz?
All of the female examples on the app have average or deeper voices except Emma Watson. Any idea why that is?
Yeah, I have a few ideas. One of the main points is that most of the matches come from actors and, if the industry prefers people with a deeper voices or trains people to speak more deeply, you might expect the database to be deeper than average.
Another thing is that I don’t totally believe the attested averages. They’re supposed to be 200Hz for women and about 120Hz for men, but I have a feeling the sample comes from undergrads who might have higher voices than average. I’m not sure how much a person’s voice changes over time though. I’d like to create my own average at some point.
Oh yeah, please recommend me some higher pitched voices if you can think of any. I need to add Saorsie Ronan, but it’s been tough finding higher voices.
Going by my own friends and family, I think you may be right about the averages.
Some higher voices I’ve found are Jade Thirlwall from Little Mix and Cressida Bonas. Not very famous though. Maybe also Claire Foy and Naomi Watts but I’m not sure about theirs being high. Hope that helps!
add corpse husband voice
Are there any plans for more celebrities on the app? It’d be really cool to see a chart with comparisons as well 🙂
Sure, who else do you want on?
Alicia Vikander, Amanda Seyfried, Blake Lively, Dan Stevens, Emma Roberts, Freddie Highmore, Logan Lerman… That’s probably enough for now ?
Keep going if you want. The app needs more female voices, especially high-pitched ones. I might have to apply some sort of ‘fame test’ to the suggestions though – maybe only include people who’ve been searched on Google a certain number of times…
Maybe Ariana Grande, Drew Barrymore, Julie Andrews, Lily James, Princess Diana? Some classic celebrities like Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe would be neat too ?
Could you tell me how high the girl in this video’s voice is please? https://youtu.be/R0DeOR3e2Fo
I can’t seem to get a consistent reading so it would be really helpful. Thank you!
Okay, I’m currently working on an assignment, but I’ll run it through the Windows program later. Out of interest, I’ve noticed more women commenting here than normally do. Has the app been shared somewhere recently?
That’s great. Thank you 🙂 And I’m not sure, sorry! I heard about it from one of my friends.
Help! I’ve been judging my progress trying to imitate someone else’s voice and I’ve been playing the same recording of her every day before I repeat the same little monologue. Obviously my numbers fluctuate… but so are hers! But it’s the same recording, why does it give different results here? Thanks!
Hi Kendal,
It’s probably down to background factors like speaker quality, background noise, the particular room you’re in. This wouldn’t happen if you fed the acoustic data straight into the program and I find that I get very consistent results from my own voice when I control for time of day and room. Could that explain it? I tend to advise against running Vocular for digitally produced speech.
I would like to now how you can put a 10 kg weight into your mouth or do you bind it around something, to train your neck?
Hi Luca, you don’t. In all likelihood, your head only weighs about 5kg, so you’re tripling the load by adding 10kg. I’d recommend adding 0.5kg then 1kg and so on. I’ve tended to just do this by resting a file of papers on my forehead as I do the neck crunches, something like that.
Hello, I have a few problems with the app. I’ve been using it for about 6 months and I’ve lowered my voice depth from around 85hz to 60hz. (I have a really tense neck) but my old recordings are gone and I cant playback my new recordings. It’s really frustrating when the app was working great but now I can’t even listen back to my old or new recordings.
Hi Robert, sorry for my late reply. I forwarded your last message to Stuart as soon as I got it. Are you on the latest update of the app? He submitted another one on the day of your last message that should have fixed your problem, but we can’t recreate it so it’s hard for us to know if it’s still an issue.
Is it possible to save my recordings outside the app and then upload them to the app again? A feature like that would be really useful for tracking my progress
Hi Alex, it’s on the list because a few people have asked for it. The developer is currently on quite an intensive contract so he doesn’t have much free time, but that should be over soon…
What do you mean by saying: “speak with a descended larynx”?
I think I go into a bit more detail in the blog post on lowering pitch, but I’m basically talking about speaking with your Adam’s apple lower. Honestly, I’d focus on the neck exercises though. They seem to get the best results by far.
I love this app! It’s exactly what I was searching for, but I don’t understand one thing… in the distribution page on the app, the the Y axis is the Hz depth, but what is the X axis? I find my voice to have a very wide X axis, what does it mean?
Hi Stefano, thanks! The distribution is a histogram, so the X axis represents how often a certain frequency was detected. So the frequencies with the longest bars are the most common ones.
Hi,
I don’t understand the chart…what does it mean that it’s thin above and below and wider in the middle? I see other celebrities have very different shapes…like wide above and thiner from the middle to the bottom.
What is considered a deeper female voice?
I’ve read they are good for television and radio because they transmit trust.
Thank you.
Hi Jana, the distribution chart is what you would technically call a histogram. Basically it shows every frequency detected from your voice, as well as how often it was detected. So a voice which has a lot of bars grouped together into a narrow band represents a monotone quality (Alan Rickman’s, for example). One where the bars are more spread out indicates a speaker who uses a lot of intonation (see David Attenborough). I’m not sure the shape actually matters, although that’s an interesting question. I might look into that at some point.
A deep female voice would be anything below 160Hz, I would say.
Hi Erik,
I’m transitioning (male to female) so this is pretty helpful for getting a good pitch and inflection. I was wondering if the app was going to add something in for resonance? Maybe I’m just dumb and missing something, but that would probably be the most helpful for me at this point.
Hey Isabel, that’s not a dumb question at all. Currently the app just does pitch, however I’ve recently started a PhD looking at what makes a voice sound male or female and I’ll be putting the research into this app. Some of the changes should be coming soon (like a measurement of how smooth a voice is – women generally have smoother voices than men). Other ideas, like an algorithm which effectively genders a voice, might take a while – it’s a lot more complicated than I first thought. I guess that would be a useful feature? I want to bring resonance into the analysis as well.
Sorry if this got submitted already (phone crashed). Thanks for this! I’m transitioning (male to female) and over been able to comfortably speak in the 180/190ish range. My inflection has improved too. I was wondering about resonance and if the app was coming out with something to measure resonance? It seems like my biggest weakness right now. Anyways, this is amazing. Thanks!
Just bought the app after searching for how do I measure my voice pitch. I have a question is there a difference for voice pitch in men from different countries/area? Say for example a Brit from Liverpool (scouser) compared to a Texan?
Hi Nick, good question! I’ve been wondering this for a while. This is definitely true for women – Japanese women speak with much higher voices than Dutch, for example. It may be different for men though because deeper voices are almost universally considered more attractive and more authoritative, so there aren’t really any incentives to go the other way. You do get cultures that dislike monotone voices in a way you don’t see in the English speaking world though (French, Chinese, Japanese) so I guess you’d expect them to sound higher than a voice with quite a flat intonation. I might look into this at some point, you just need to collect/edit a lot of recordings for this kind of thing.
Oi. Eu gostaria de saber quando vai haver uma atualização do app para os recursos: suavidade, soprosidade, etc.
Eu consegui baixar minha frequência de voz em 30 hertz em aproximadamente 45 dias.
Hi Rodrigo, 30Hz in 45 days is impressive! I’m actually doing a PhD on the acoustics of the human voice now and we’re pretty much in the position where we could release a ‘smoothness’ feature. Breathiness is a bit more complex but that’s probably not far off. What I’m really trying to do is create an index of his attractive a voice sounds so we can use that in a voice coaching feature – but I’ll need to run experiments and collect data from raters before I can implement that.
Ok. Eu já havia feito este comentário sobre 30 htz no youtube, mas tive um problema com a minha conta. Você se lembra ? “Rodrigo Machado”? Você havia me pedido um link do exercício de abaixamento de laringe. Você também havia me perguntado se poderia usar a minha experiência como depoimento. Sim, eu apoio. Minha voz tem uma extensão vocal de A1-A7 ou mais, devido aos exercícios que eu experimentei. Quer saber mais?
Yeah, I remember you. I just wasn’t sure you were the same guy. Yes please, it’d be great to hear before/after too.
Hi there,
I left a review stating the response time needed increasing within the app. For example, sometimes i need to tap an icon 2 or 3 times for it to work. All my other apps are working fine, just this app.
Also in the contact fields below, the text is white and can’t be seen when typing in the white background, may need to be changed. Once a few adjustments have been made this app will be really great!
Hi Chris, thanks for letting me know. I use the iOS version so I’m often unaware of issues with the Android one. We’ve got a new build coming now, just having trouble getting it through the automated test launch. I’ll let you know when these things are sorted.
Você quer ouvir o meu antes e depois de usar o exercício? Acho que por hora o que eu posso fazer é explicar o que eu fiz. Porque foi tudo atravéz de tutoriais escritos (artigo).
1. Durante 15 dias seguidos eu fiz um exercício chamado “espaguete sugado” que consiste em fingir estar sugando espaguete (quando na verdade é o ar) pela boca até a laringe baixar no seu limite.
2. Então, permaneça com a laringe baixada e o ar preso por 15 segundos.
3. Faça este movimento por 15 vezes em 3 séries.
4. Em seguida, cante vocalizes com a sílaba “ba” por um instante.
5. Por último fale palavras com a mesma sílaba (ba) também por um instante.
6. 30 dias fazendo o exercício para o pescoço, sugerido no app. É isso. Espero ter ajudado. Estou à disposição…
I have no idea what I just wrote in the name section and the email section because it’s white writing on a white background (iOS)
My email address in case you want to reach me is Sarah.felton7285@gmail.com
I wanted an app just like this to see how monotonous my voice is. Thanks for creating it. If I’m understanding correctly, a monotone voice isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Monotonous and monotone are not necessarily the same?
I’m asking as I would assume being seen to have a monotonous voice would likely be seen as a bad thing?
Hi Sarah,
Hmm, I thought I fixed that but I’ll take a look into it.
That’s right. A monotone voice is basically one that doesn’t have much intonation – it doesn’t deviate much from one core frequency. Those voices tend to sound more composed than boring. Tom Hiddleston or Harrison Ford are good examples of this for men. Emily Blunt is the most monotone female voice I’ve found, although it has to be said that women generally speak with more intonation.
As for monotonous voices, they’re definitely bad, although I’ve not sure how to describe them objectively. My gut feeling is that it’s a mix of slow speech but also very little variation in the rate of speech, so it’s consistently slow. That’s just a guess though.
I write more about this here if you’re interested: http://vocularapp.com/monotone-voice-myth/
Hi James, I’ve seen many different studies on how breathiness contributes to vocal attractiveness, but what about roughness/raspiness? I tend to notice a lot of celebrities that are known for having breathy voices like Scarlett Johansson or Kathleen Turner are also accompanied by vocal roughness. Does that play a factor in how attractive a voice sounds or is the ideal female voice one that sounds breathy and smooth instead?
Hello James, I’ve always known that breathiness contributes to vocal attractiveness, but what about roughness/raspiness? I tend to notice a lot of celebrities that are known for having breathy voices such as Scarlett Johansson or Kathleen Turner are also accompanied by vocal roughness. Does that play a factor in how attractive a voice sounds or is the ideal female voice one that sounds breathy and smooth instead?
Hey Charli, sorry for the late reply. You caught me just as I was getting into bed. It’s hard to say with the roughness thing because a lot of the variables you’d use to measure it are also indicators of a breathy voice. I’ve also just looked up a paper that used subjective measurements of voice quality and they found that ‘throatiness’ made female voices less attractive, but it wasn’t significantly different. Unfortunately they didn’t have ‘roughness’ as a rating though. Unfortunately, there also aren’t many papers that look at the female voice, because it doesn’t undergo the same radical change around puberty so it’s not as obviously been selected for like the male voice has…
Generally though, the roughness measures (HNR, jitter, shimmer) don’t make a difference.
Oh, I guess I should also say that people don’t generally like vocal fry, which tends to be a rougher kind of speech. But that might be a cultural thing, or it might be because of the extreme change in pitch you get with vocal fry.
Sorry for commenting this twice. Thanks for answering this question because I’ve been wondering about this for a while now. I hear a lot of people speak highly of raspy voices, but I always thought that smoother voices would be seen as more attractive since they usually sound younger and healthier.
Yeah, voices can be weird like this. One thing I’ve found from analysing Reddit posts where people name ‘women with sexy voices’ is that they’re basically all much deeper than the average – Johansson, Stone, Beckinsale. Another weird one is that I’m not convinced people actually like the sound of healthy voices more than ill ones, at least for men. I’ve known a number of men talk about how they prefer the sound of their own voices when they’ve got a cold, but that’s pretty nuts from an evolutionary standpoint…
Hey, I’m wondering how exactly this makes sense? I consistently get 96 or a little lower hz but I still sound much younger than people with the same 96 hz. Could you please explain and tell me how I could fix this? Thanks in advance.
What are all the voice classifications? Mine is in the category deepest but I want to know how many classes there are above mine.
Hi Mason, I think there’s nine categories. I’ll add the full list to the app so people can see it when they click on that row, although it’s a bit arbitrary. I only added it to give people a better idea of where they fell on the range – the numbers are a better way of gauging your voice depth.
Hello, I tried to find this list on the android app and didn’t see it anywhere. Could you post the categories here?
Hi Osam, I wouldn’t pay much attention to the categories tbh. They’re just there for people who’ve never used the app before to put the results into some context. I’d only pay attention to the numbers/matches.
So just as a quick question, is a pitch of ~80 Hz pretty deep? When I look up the ranges for male voice pitch, it usually has 80 or 85 as the lowest number. I just ask because when I listen back to it it doesn’t sound super deep to me. It definitely doesn’t sound high, but it doesn’t sound super low either. Thank you!
Hi Eli, a median of 80Hz is definitely a deep pitch. There are other factors that can change how a voice sounds though. Nasality makes it sound higher, and high formant frequencies (which I’m currently working on) makes a voice sound more feminine too.
And then just as a follow up question regarding those other factors, I am currently only 19. Most sources I have looked at say your voice doesn’t usually “settle” until well after puberty. Do you think even if my voice doesn’t get much deeper that “settling” will help with those other factors to make it sound a bit better? Also, big fan of the app and am trying out your neck exercises. Thanks!
My voice is around 67-82Hz and I am 15 years old. Idk it’s that good?
I’m a little confused by the graph. Is it a compound of all my tests? What is it exactly showing just looks like 4 lines going up to me? Why can’t you compare days or morning v afternoon ?
Hello, that’s quite a cool idea, the morning vs afternoon thing, although I suspect it would show everyone the same thing – your voice is deeper early in the morning. The graph is simply all the depth measurements plotted on the same axes – median, mean, mode, and lowest significant pitch. So if the lines are going up, it means your voice has got higher. It’s not exactly a day by day account, but we figured that people would only submit one recording per day anyway, so there’d effectively be no difference. Maybe we should reformat it though.
Hey, thanks for the great app and the work you put in.
I (M/26) always get high voice depth (122 hz), high average (122hz), high median (136hz), and high classification (high).
But I have a mode of 67 hz and my musical note is bass and I have a low variance.
I always have women like Hillary Clinton and Julia Roberts as my matches, which makes me feel like I sound like a woman.
People tell me I have a deep voice, but the app tells me otherwise, or do I just interpret the data in a wrong way?
Thanks in advance!
Addition: I also get very high vocal fry results, around 35%…
Hello there, ah yeah, I wouldn’t put too much stock in the matches. There’s a lot that makes a voice sound masculine or feminine beyond pitch and the women you cited have pretty low voices. I’m actually thinking about asking people what gender they want their matches to be when they first open the app because the male/female comparisons don’t make much sense.
You haven’t interpreted this the wrong way, but pitch is actually a weirder concept than people realise. If you shout or speak as if addressing a crowd, the pitch of your voice goes up, even though it doesn’t necessarily sound squeaky or high-pitched. Nasality does the opposite – it can make a voice sound high even though it’s low technically. Then you get some voices like Michael Madsen’s where his voice is fairly high but so gruff that it sounds more masculine than most voices. So it’s a more complicated concept than the app currently depicts, but I’m confident that in 95% of cases, using pitch as a measure of depth works fine. Maybe your vocal fry (indicated by the low mode of 67Hz) affects this with your voice.
What does it mean when the light while recording turns from red to yellow?
That means you’ve hit 1,000 data points in your recording so it’s definitely a reliable sample.
I’d rather not know my voice is similar to certain people (eg, politicians) even if it is. Is it possible to remove them from the list?
Hi William, no, not currently, although maybe we should add that feature. We’re currently planning to ask the user what gender of matches they’d like when they first use the app. Just because some women like Cate Blanchett have very deep female voices that maybe gives the wrong impression to a lot of male users. Likewise, guys like Tobey Maguire.
Hi,
I have tried to do payment two times and completed but no responce from vocular.
I also couldn’t see the install botton in play store.
Hi Nainesh, so no money has been taken from your account? We don’t get alerted to these things. I’ll look into the Install issue too.
I did two times but money debited from my account after some minute automatically credited in my account. In between, i can not able to download from play store. Whenever i payed, i could find any kind of install toggle.
Please suggest me the path for purchase.
It’s problem like debited and then after some time credited. I have tried third time and payment has been debited from my accpunt but after then automatically credited.
I have done my payment through indian bank.
Is it a problem?
It shouldn’t be, as quite a lot of our downloads come from India. It does sound like the problem is with the payment transaction rather than the app though. Is PayPal an option for you?
Would love if you’d add Sam Elliott to the list of celebrities. That’s the voice I’m most shooting for.
Hi Brad, I’ll add him, although my guess is that he’ll be around 75Hz…
Is there any chance the pitch tracker could be expanded just a little lower? The 57hz cutoff is just 2hz away from the highly coveted A1.
Hi Niji, yes, we’ll implement this in the next release (so long as it can be measured reliably).
Is there a reason for 57hz being the lowest the app registers? Also, would you advise against doing things to deepen my voice when I usually match with Russel Crowe and Barry White?