Am I singing in tune?
You cannot answer this by listening to yourself while you sing — here is why, and how to get a measured answer from 30 seconds of recording.
Why you cannot tell from inside your own head
While you sing, you hear yourself through two paths at once: the air, like everyone else, and the bone of your own skull, which nobody else hears at all. Bone conduction favours low frequencies and arrives with no delay, so the voice in your head is warmer, fuller, and does not sound like the recording.
The consequence for pitch is specific: you are judging your accuracy against a signal that no listener receives, while simultaneously producing it. That is why singers who are confident in the room are surprised by playback, and why the useful test is always a recording.
What "in tune" actually means
Two different questions hide inside it. The first is whether each note landed where it was aimed, measured in cents — a hundredth of a semitone. The second is whether the notes belong to the harmony playing underneath, which is a question about key rather than about precision.
They come apart. A singer can be within a few cents of every note they intended and still be in the wrong key for the track. A report that gave one number for both would be answering neither.
How to get an answer in 30 seconds
Record yourself unaccompanied for half a minute and have the pitch tracked. Unaccompanied matters: with no backing track there is nothing bleeding into the measurement, and the pitch track is of your voice and nothing else.
A sentivoice quick check does exactly that from the browser — no file to find, no upload, and no backing track to arrange. It returns pitch accuracy in cents, a vocal strain reading, and a dynamics score, and it costs one credit.
What to do with the answer
A consistent lean in one direction is the useful finding, because it has a known cause and a known fix. Flat usually means breath support; sharp usually means pushing. Scattered errors in both directions point at ear training instead.
Run a 30-second quick check
Sing into your microphone for 30 seconds and get measured scores for pitch accuracy, vocal strain and dynamics. Free once a month, no account and no file to upload.
Run a 30-second quick checkCommon questions
Why do I sound out of tune on recordings but fine in my head?
Because the version in your head arrives partly through your own skull, which adds low frequencies and removes the delay of hearing yourself through a room. The recording is what everyone else hears; your internal version is not available to anyone but you.
Can I check my pitch without an account?
A free browser tuner will show you the note you are producing in real time, which is useful for single sustained tones. What it cannot do is tell you your average bias across a performance, which is the measurement that identifies a fixable pattern rather than a single miss.
How long does the recording need to be?
Thirty seconds is enough for a stable reading of pitch bias, strain and dynamics. Below about five seconds there is not enough voiced audio to measure anything from.