A mirror shows our reflection and is unbiased since it has no predetermined notions or assumptions about anything. It just reflects what’s in front of it.
We all use a mirror daily to know how we look and feel. A mirror largely has helped people who emote using facial expressions or actors, in general, to make them look good while they emote.
However, for people who like to sing, sounding good matters the most. But how do we know if we sound good? The feedback we get from friends/family is often biased or half the truth largely skewed towards making the singing aspirant happy.
Is there a mirror that reflects the truth about our singing?
Say hello to Riyaz – the popular DIY music learning app works just like a mirror that reflects our singing so that we can see and make corrections while we sing. It tells us the quality of our singing in real time with deep insights into our voice. The truth uncovered through this app helps us to know the areas for improvement. It is probably the most trustworthy and unbiased personal music teacher or guides one can get!
Riyaz app – A Mirror for the Voice of aspiring singers
Singing “in sur” or in tune is one of the most fundamental skills to be developed for good singing. This involves singing the right pitches. In scientific terms, the pitch of a sound tells us how many cycles the sound wave is completing each second (it is measured in the unit Hertz). A higher-pitch sound (for example, a bird chirping) cycles at a faster rate than a lower-pitch sound (think Amitabh Bachchan’s deep, resounding voice). Women and children typically speak and sing at higher pitches than men.
On Riyaz, we get a visual aid of the pitches of the original singer as a reference and our voices together in real-time as we sing along with the original singer. This is an easy and intuitive way to understand if we are singing the pitches accurately or not. We can see whether the pitch we sang is higher, lower, or at the same pitch as the original singer.
Riyaz also has a Smart Tanpura in which we can sing without a reference pitch such as the pitch of the original singer and check the contour (shape of the pitches) of our voices as we sing. Music aspirants who learn Hindustani or Carnatic music can choose a Raag and set a Shruti (base note) to regularly practice the specific notes of the Raag and master them.
The mirror of the voice is too good to be true!
We all know the science behind a typical mirror to see the reflection of our body. Let’s discuss the science behind this new mirror to “see” how we sound.
Much like the human brain takes in a sound signal and processes several pieces of information about it, the tech behind the Riyaz app takes the recorded signal of our voice and processes it to extract pitch information from it. Subsequently, it compares the pitches we have sung to those of the original singer, and scores us accordingly. Unlike a human being who may come with a number of cultural and social biases, the Riyaz app’s technology looks at the pitch information in our singing in an objective and unbiased manner. As a result, the feedback we receive is scientific and free from subjective influences.
Seeing is believing, isn’t it? Download Riyaz app and try out this mirror right away! 🙂