r/eartraining • u/OpenAirport6204 • 7d ago

Can't hear when I'm singing sharp/flat.

/r/singing/comments/1x3faak/cant_hear_when_im_singing_sharpflat/
2 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

1

u/to7m 7d ago

Can you hear when a note you're singing is in tune with that same note on a piano?

1

u/OpenAirport6204 7d ago

If it’s with my piano I can hear the difference/ that I’m out of tune. It’s when I don’t have a note on a piano with me that I can’t tell.

1

u/to7m 7d ago

What if you have a different note on the piano?

1

u/OpenAirport6204 6d ago

Then I can hear the note I’m supposed to sing and then sing it. Sorry if this is a poor explanation, but when I hear the note I’m supposed to sing I can sing it.

1

u/to7m 6d ago

So is it just when you have no backing music at all that you can't sing in tune?

1

u/OpenAirport6204 6d ago

Mainly yes. Although I struggle more if the instrument being played isn’t a piano.

1

u/to7m 6d ago

If there's no backing music at all, then most professional singers can't sing in tune. That's a thing that only people with perfect pitch can do.

1

u/CentricNeutral 5d ago

Since you can hear when a piano note is sharp or flat but struggle to judge your own singing, practise connecting what you hear with what you produce: play a comfortable note, sing it back, judge whether you’re sharp or flat before checking your pitch app, then use the feedback to correct yourself and try again. Gradually progress to short melodies, recording yourself and comparing your singing with the reference. Research suggests that visual pitch feedback can help improve singing accuracy, particularly when reproducing melodies, but use your app to calibrate your hearing rather than relying on it indefinitely (i.e. Berglin, J., Pfordresher, P. Q., & Demorest, S. (2022). The effect of visual and auditory feedback on adult poor-pitch remediation. Psychology of Music, 50(4), 1077-1090. https://doi.org/10.1177/03057356211026730).

Aside from that you may want to put time into learning solfeggio so that instead of merely trying to match isolated pitches, you'd learn to hear and reproduce relationships between notes, which can ease you into anticipating a pitch before singing it and recognizing when you've sung it inaccurately.