This past weekend's How to Tell You Are Singing on Pitch seminar

Camille,

Thank you so much for putting together this past weekend's How to Tell You Are Singing on Pitch seminar. 

I have been using the chromatic tuner and it is really shedding light on how far from dead-center I am when singing notes. 

A couple of questions:

1. Is there a rule of thumb for how many hertz sharp or flat a note can be before the human ear can perceive it as pitchy?

2. Why is it that certain vowels/syllable combinations are easier to sing on-pitch than others? 

For example, for me ah sounds are easy, oh, ee, ii (eye),  and uu are much harder. 

Doug 

Great questions, Doug!

1. There is definitely not a consensus on how flat or sharp a singer can be before they sound out of tune. There are 100 cents in each semitone, so you can see each tick mark on https://tuner.ninja/ represents 10 cents. To my ear, I think you can get away with less than 10 cents sharp or flat - but no more than that. With tuner ninja, you show up as "green" when you're within that range. Some people might say 5 cents sharp or flat is a better rule of thumb. But again, I'm not finding a good consensus. I will, however, link a bunch of interesting articles and discussion threads if you're interested!

What makes this difficult is that we're usually not tuning to a specific frequency: we're tuning our voices relative to an instrument or karaoke track. Look up "just vs equal temperament" if you'd like to learn more about how different instruments are tuned. 

Because singers are performers, not machines, they may give a performance that is not perfectly in tune, but still sounds good to us. I'd love to isolate and analyze vocals of singers from the past few decades (before autotune/melodyne was so widely used) - and maybe someone already has! It's possible that many of our favorite artists are singing "in tune enough". 

https://bulletproofmusician.com/how-perfect-does-your-intonation-have-to-be/

http://www.peretzlab.ca/site/assets/files/1209/hutchins_musicperception_2012.pdf

https://www.quora.com/Does-singing-a-few-cents-off-matter

http://www.3daudioinc.com/3db/archive/index.php/t-6829.html

2. The short answer is: each vowel is produced by a different shape within your vocal tract, which produces a different set of overtones/harmonics. You may want to experiment with "vowel modification" to make those tricky vowels easier to sing! I'd also consider which register you're in. (For example, I struggle to sing an OO vowel in tune around an E4 or F4 in pure chest voice, because that's where my voice naturally "breaks" into head voice). I'll attach some research on vowels, formants, and harmonics below. 

http://www.singwise.com/cgi-bin/main.pl?section=articles&doc=VowelsFormantsAndModifications&page=3

https://www.voicescienceworks.org/harmonics-vs-formants.html