Swara Singing Trainer

Three minutes to your first reading

1. Set your Sa. Choose it from the list, or hold the note you use as Sa and tap Set Sa from my voice — the tool takes the nearest semitone to what you held for about a second. Not sure? See choosing a Sa below.
2. Pick a raga. It opens on Mayamalavagowla, the raga beginners learn their varisais in. The graph shows a level line for each swara of the raga and nothing else, so there is no clutter from notes the raga does not use.
3. Tap the microphone and allow it. The tanpura starts, the tool listens to the room for a couple of seconds — stay quiet — and then asks you to sing.
4. Hold a swara. Sing “aa” on Sa. Your voice appears as a line moving right to left. Bring it onto the gold Sa line and keep it there. Then walk up the scale, one line at a time.
5. Switch to Exercises when the free line starts behaving, choose one, and press Start. The guide sings a phrase; you sing it back in the same time; every note is marked.

No microphone to hand? Check a recording plays an audio file of singing and draws its pitch on the same graph. Set Sa to the singer's Sa first, so the swaras are named correctly.

Reading the graph

Height is pitch and time runs sideways. An octave is the same distance wherever it falls, so the gaps between the lines are the real sizes of the steps in the raga — you can see that Mayamalavagowla's Ri sits close above Sa and far below Ga before you can hear it. The gold lines are Sa and the teal ones Pa, the two fixed swaras. Lines in the octave above carry a dot over the letter, lines below a dot under it.

The colour of your line says how the note is sitting:

held on a swaraheld, a little offheld, well offmoving between swaras

A moving line is never coloured as a mistake. Carnatic music lives in the movement between swaras, and a slide or a shake is not a note sung out of tune — so the trainer only passes judgement once the pitch has stayed put for about a tenth of a second.

Beside the microphone, the big syllable is the raga swara nearest to what you are singing, and the needle shows how far you are from it: left is flat, right is sharp, and the shaded band in the middle is “in tune”.

Varisais and alankarams, phrase by phrase

Exercises work the way a class does. The guide voice sings a phrase while its notes scroll past as gold blocks; after one beat's rest the same blocks come round again, outlined, and it is your turn. A soft tick marks each beat. When the phrase ends, each note is marked: teal for in tune, gold for close, coral for off, with the number of cents sharp (+) or flat (−), or a dash if it was not heard. If fewer than three notes in five landed, the phrase is given to you once more — up to two extra tries — before the exercise moves on. Untick Repeat a missed phrase to sing straight through.

These exercises are patterns of positions in the scale rather than fixed notes, which is why a teacher can move them from one raga to another. The trainer stores them the same way and lays each pattern over the arohana for the climb and the avarohana for the descent. So in Kambhoji, Bilahari or Bhairavi — ragas that come down by a different road than they went up — you practise the descent the raga actually has. Sarali varisais 2 to 7 are written for seven-swara scales and appear only for those ragas; the five-swara ragas get the scale, janta, datu and alankarams.

At the end you get a summary: the share of notes in tune, and for each swara how far, on average, you sat above or below it. One swara that is always 25 cents sharp is a far more useful thing to know than an overall mark — it tells you what to go back and hold in Long notes. Your best result for each exercise in each raga is kept on this device.

How a note is judged

• By its settled middle. The first part of each note is ignored, and the note is given the middle value (the median) of what remains. The glide into a note, a shake around it, and the odd misread moment do not pull the result about.
• Wherever in time you sang it. Sound takes time to leave a loudspeaker and come back through a microphone, and nobody starts exactly on the beat. Before marking, the trainer slides your whole phrase by up to half a second to where it fits the targets best.
• In any octave. A child or a woman answering a man's guide an octave up has sung the same swara. Octaves are folded away in the marking, and your line is drawn in the guide's octave so the two can be compared.
• “Not heard” means there was too little steady sound in that note's slot to judge — usually a breath, or a note sung too softly. Raise the mic sensitivity if it happens often.

Seeing what a teacher hears

Shruti shuddham — purity of pitch — is the first thing a Carnatic student is asked for and the last thing they stop working on. The difficulty is that you cannot easily hear your own voice from the outside. A teacher can, and says “higher… a little more… there”. The Swara Singing Trainer does the same job with a picture: it shows you where your voice is, against where the swara is, while you are still singing it.

It is a practice mirror, not a teacher. It can tell you that your Ga is sitting high; it cannot tell you how a phrase in Todi should be shaped. Use it for the part of practice that is plain repetition — holding swaras, walking the scale, the varisais — and take what it shows you back to your lessons.

Choosing a Sa

Your Sa (shruti, or kattai) is the note everything else is measured from, and it should suit your voice, not the other way round. A workable test: from Sa you should be able to sing down four or five swaras to the Pa below without growling, and up past the higher Sa to the Pa above without straining. Most men settle between C3 and D♯3 (1 to 2½ kattai), most women between F♯3 and A♯3 (4½ to 6½ kattai), and children often higher still. The list runs from G2 to E4. The kattai number beside each note is the harmonium-key name used in South India: the white keys from C are 1 to 7, and a black key is the half above the white key below it.

Why the lines are not where a piano's notes are

A piano divides the octave into twelve equal steps. Carnatic swaras are tuned as simple ratios against Sa — Pa is exactly 3/2, antara Ga exactly 5/4 — which is why they fuse with the tanpura instead of beating against it. The two tunings disagree by up to 18 cents: antara Ga is about 14 cents lower than a piano's major third, and shuddha Rishabha about 12 cents higher than a piano's minor second. By default the lines here are drawn at the just positions, the same ones the Carnatic Ragas Player plays. If you are practising to a keyboard or a karaoke track, switch Tuning to Equal temperament and the lines, the guide and the marking all move to the piano's notes.

How the pitch is found

There is no AI model behind this and nothing is sent to a server. A sung note is a pattern that repeats — a hundred to several hundred times a second. The page takes a short slice of sound, about a fortieth of a second, and looks for the smallest shift at which the slice lines up with itself again; that shift is one cycle of the note, and its length gives the pitch. It does this about a hundred times a second, for voices from about 65 Hz to 1,100 Hz.

A reading counts as singing only when the sound is clearly repeating and clearly louder than the room. That is why the tool asks for a couple of seconds of quiet when the microphone opens: with the tanpura already playing, whatever reaches the microphone in that moment — the drone from your loudspeaker included — is taken as “the room”, and you have to be louder than it to be drawn. It also knows which notes its own tanpura is playing, and asks a little more of a voice on exactly those notes before believing it. Single stray readings are smoothed away before anything reaches the graph.

Getting a clean reading

• Use headphones if you can, and tick the Headphones box. Then the microphone hears only you. Without them, keep the tanpura and guide volume moderate and the device a hand's width or two from your mouth.
• Sing “aa”. An open vowel gives the clearest reading. Words and consonants break the line; that is normal.
• A quiet room. A fan, traffic or another voice makes the line patchy. If the line appears when you are not singing, lower Mic sensitivity; if it will not appear when you are, raise it.
• Start slow. At 60 notes a minute each note lasts a full second, long enough to find it. Raise the pace only when the slow version is mostly teal.
• Bluetooth earphones add delay. The marking allows for up to half a second of it, but the tick and the picture will feel late. Wired headphones are better for this.

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