Introduction

As a singer or instrumentalist, almost everything you work on can be traced back to two questions:

VoceVista is built to answer both questions, in real time and side by side. You can watch the pitch of every note as you sing or play it, on a musical staff and a piano keyboard, and at the same time see the full harmonic structure of your sound on a spectrogram, with musically meaningful axes and overtone guides.

At its core, VoceVista is a precise, real-time audio spectrum analyzer. While it has been carefully tailored for musical use, it is not limited to voice or instruments: you can use it to analyze any kind of sound — singing bowls, bird song, machine noise, room acoustics, synthesized tones, or recordings you load from disk. The same display that shows you a singer’s vibrato can show you the partials of a bell or the resonances of a room.

VoceVista is also a tool for understanding. It makes the interplay between sound, music and our perception of music tangible: how harmonics combine to form a timbre, how musical intervals relate to the natural overtone series, and how the ear turns physical vibrations into the experience of pitch and tone color.

For the human voice, this becomes particularly powerful. VoceVista lets you observe and explore the different layers of voice production:

Seeing these layers at work — and being able to change them with your own voice in real time — turns abstract theory into something you can hear, see, and practice with.

VoceVista supports a simple but powerful workflow cycle that brings these capabilities together:

These three aspects go hand in hand, and you can use each of them on its own. You can simply measure a sound, you can use the program to study the theory of harmonics and formants, or you can use it as a practice companion — or all three together, as a continuous loop.

To make this concrete, here are some of the things VoceVista helps you do every day:

Singers can use the program as a visual feedback aid to practice pitch and intonation, to develop and refine vibrato, formants and vowel color, and to work on any other aspect of their vocal technique.

Singing teachers can use VoceVista like a mirror for the voice, to show students what they are actually doing and to make subtle changes in tone, resonance and pitch immediately visible.

Voice therapists can use the program to monitor the progress of their clients and as an additional sensory feedback channel for specific exercises.

Instrumentalists can use VoceVista to check intonation, analyze their tone, compare different instruments, mouthpieces, reeds or setups, and follow how their sound changes with technique.

Instrument builders and tuners can measure and analyze their instruments with high precision and detail.

Instrument vendors can document the sound characteristics of their wares. This is especially useful for handmade instruments, where each item is unique.

Choir conductors can analyze blend, intonation and timbre across the ensemble, identify problem passages in recordings, and work on chord purity and a more uniform vowel color — helping even amateur choirs achieve a polished, professional sound.

Composers and arrangers can use VoceVista to study how voices and instruments produce their characteristic colors and how those colors combine, and to ground choices about register, scoring and timbre in what is actually happening in the sound.

Musical theorists find in VoceVista a visual aid for exploring intervals, scales and tuning systems, and for relating classical harmony to the natural relationships between tones.

Overtone musicians can use VoceVista to study and improve their technique and to create or rehearse complex compositions, with the visualization of their own harmonics as direct feedback.

These are just a few examples of who works with VoceVista; in practice, anyone curious about sound and how it is built up will find something useful here.

This manual can be used in several ways. If you already know what you want to do and simply need to know how certain things work, have a look through the Reference Guide. When you are using the program and need help with a settings page that is currently open, click on its Help button to bring up the online help for this settings page.

To simply get yourself started, go to the Quickstart Guide and at the User Interface Overview.