How high, how low

Sing your lowest comfortable note, then your highest, and Atlas measures the distance between them — not by subtracting, but by dividing. Your range is a ratio, and counting the doublings inside it gives your range in octaves.

works for:Ages 6–9Ages 10–13Ages 14+

the big idea, in plain words

Everyone’s voice can only go so low and so high. The stretch in between is your range. But here is the surprise: to measure it we don’t subtract the two notes — we divide them. Going up one octave always doubles the hertz, so the fair way to count is “how many times does my voice double?” Sing your lowest note, then your highest, and let Atlas count.

sing low, then high — the capture remembers both

Press start, hum your lowest comfortable note and hold it, then slide up to your highest. The lowest and highest steady pitches stay pinned below.

Your voice never leaves this device.

how your range compares

voice	low → high	in octaves
A young child’s voice	A (220 Hz) → A (440 Hz)	≈ 1 octave
A trained adult singer	roughly two doublings or more	≈ 2+ octaves
The whole human voice	lowest bass E (82 Hz) → highest soprano C (1047 Hz)	≈ 3.67 octaves

From the lowest bass to the highest soprano is a doubling piled on a doubling piled on a doubling — the whole human voice spans about 3.67 octaves.

For the classroom

Learning goals

A musical range is a ratio of frequencies, not a difference — going up an octave multiplies frequency by 2 every time.
The size of a range in octaves is the base-2 logarithm of the high/low frequency ratio: octaves = log2(f_hi / f_lo).
Logarithms turn repeated multiplication into simple addition: every doubling of frequency adds exactly one octave.

Try this

1.Have each student capture their lowest and highest steady note, read off the ratio and the octaves, and line the class up from smallest range to largest.
2.Give the class two frequencies (e.g. 110 Hz and 440 Hz), ask them to predict the octaves by counting doublings (110→220→440 = 2), then confirm with log2(440/110) = 2.