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Sight singing

A melody appears on a real staff. You are counted in on the tonic chord. You sing it, and every note is judged on pitch and rhythm together — then you see exactly which ones you nailed.

Open sight singing free · no sign-up · works offline

What it does

Pick a book — five graded books that start with stepwise melodies in easy keys and work up through wider leaps and ranges — or follow the campaign, which walks through them in order, one lesson at a time. Each exercise is engraved on a proper five-line staff with a clef, key signature and time signature, not a row of note names. The tonic chord sounds, the count-in runs, and you sing.

The microphone hears you and the judge scores each note on pitch and rhythm at once, octave-agnostic, so a bass singing an octave below the notation is not penalised. The results page colours every note — nailed in gold, good in green, rough in bronze, missed in red — and gives the run a score. Finished runs land in the practice log on their own, so your history shows the singing you did alongside the playing.

Why pianists should sing

Pianists get away without it. The keys are already in tune, so you can play a melody you cannot hear in your head. That is precisely the gap sight singing closes. If you can sing a phrase before you play it, you know how it goes; the fingers follow the ear rather than the ear following the fingers. Sight singing is the fastest way to build that inner hearing, and it costs nothing but a little embarrassment.

Everything you sing here is also what you read: intervals, key signatures, rhythm. Ten minutes a day of sight singing is ten minutes of sight reading practice you did not have to sit at the piano for.

How to practise it

• Sound the tonic on the pitch pipe or the piano, sing the scale, then start.
• Sing on a neutral syllable at first; add solfège once the pitches are secure.
• Rough notes are the interesting ones — they are usually a specific interval you consistently undershoot. Drill that interval in ear training.
• Do not skip the rhythm. Clap the exercise before you sing it if the rhythm score lags the pitch score.

Details

• Runs in the browser with microphone access; audio never leaves the device.
• Free, no ads, no account; a sign-in only backs up your log.
• Works offline once loaded, including the whole corpus.