Colla Voce app for iPhone and iPad

Colla Voce is the ideal practice companion for singers of all kinds, from beginners to professionals. (If you are looking to use Colla Voce for whistling or instrumental music, please see the note at the bottom.) See our website at http://www.collavoceapp.com for a demo video, UI Tour, FAQ and articles.

The app is built around two beautifully simple ideas:

1. A playable piano with keys that light up as you sing. If you sing a note in tune, the corresponding key is immediately highlighted in yellow. Sharp and flat notes are coloured green and red, respectively.

2. A recording tool that allows you to capture and play back your own voice, in an interactive, fluid way that is designed around the way you rehearse.

Together, these two ideas produce something that is greater than the sum of its parts. Colla Voce’s exceptionally accurate and responsive pitch detection provides real-time visual feedback on both coarse- and fine-grained singing pitch. However, the ultimate judge of musicality is the human ear, not any computer program! Instant, note-by-note replay lets you go back and hear how you sound “from the outside”. Colla Voce can even automatically play the corresponding piano notes along with the audio replay.

The psychology of singing pitch is subtle and complex. The gap between what you hear and what others hear as you sing can be surprisingly wide. Colla Voce bridges that gap. You could think of it as a mirror for your voice.

Designed with the elegant aesthetics of a real musical instrument, Colla Voce is so intuitive that anybody can pick it up and use it immediately. At the same time, it is sophisticated enough to support musicians at every stage of their musical journey. Beginners taking their first steps, learning to reliably sing back a note; students practising for aural examinations, learning intervals and sight-singing; vocal coaches looking to give their pupils a new perspective on their voices; amateur and professional singers of all kinds polishing their performances; Colla Voce offers something for everyone.

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Features:

* A playable, 3D piano keyboard with an optional overlay showing the note name for each key.
* As you sing, the corresponding piano keys are highlighted: yellow for in tune, green for sharp, red for flat.
* An innovative, proprietary algorithm, specifically tailored for singing voices, gives accurate and fast pitch detection.
* Sophisticated note tracking logic prevents highlighting of extraneous notes, e.g. intermediate pitches as the voice moves from one note to another.
* Tuning information displayed on the piano keyboard is clear and stable, even in the presence of wide vibrato (where the instantaneous pitch can range over multiple notes).
* Instantaneous pitch is displayed in a graph, so that vibrato/waver contour is visible.
* The graph also acts as an “index” for the replay functionality, allowing the user to identify sung notes by their musical note names.
* One-touch replay of the last 5 seconds, 10 seconds or 20 seconds of recorded sound. Alternatively, stop recording and drag on the fine pitch graph to scroll and select a range from 60 seconds of history (two-finger drag to scroll, single-finger drag to select).
* "Replay auto-accompany" causes the piano to automatically play the corresponding piano notes during playback.
* "Note Lock" allows you to disable keys corresponding to notes that will not be sung, allowing the note tracker and auto-accompany to avoid those notes.

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A note regarding whistling and musical instruments:

The pitch, note and tuning detection in Colla Voce is heavily optimised for the characteristics of the human voice. It might produce usable results with some other instruments, but there are no guarantees. Whistled notes are not detected reliably and, along with those played on high- or low-pitched instruments, will often lie outside the detectable pitch range.