See your own voice

Turn on the microphone and your voice draws itself on the screen. A steady note makes a tidy, repeating wiggle; a breathy “shh” makes a scribble; sing higher and the wiggle speeds up. Pitch is only how fast you wiggle the air.

works for:Ages 6–9Ages 10–13Ages 14+

the big idea, in plain words

Your voice is made of tiny pushes on the air — the same shaking you feel if you rest a finger on your throat and hum. Turn on the microphone below and that shaking gets drawn as a line. A steady note makes a tidy wiggle that repeats over and over. A breathy “shh” makes a messy scribble with no pattern. And when you sing higher, the wiggle speeds up — more wiggles squeezed into every second.

listen to your voice

Tap start, then hum or sing a steady note. The panel shows your wave, your pitch in hertz, and the nearest note.

Your voice never leaves this device.

A tidy wiggle

Hold one steady note. The line settles into the same little shape, repeating again and again. That neat repeat is what your ear hears as a clear pitch.

A scribble

Now whisper or make a “shh”. No repeating shape — just a jumble. Noise and breath have no single speed, so there is no clear note to hear.

Faster = higher

Slide your voice up. Watch the wiggles crowd together and the hertz number climb. More wiggles per second is exactly what “higher” means.

For the classroom

Learning goals

The voice is a vibration in air; a microphone plus an oscilloscope turns that invisible vibration into a visible, repeating wave.
A clear pitch corresponds to a periodic waveform, while breath and noise are aperiodic — a scribble with no single frequency.
Frequency (Hz) counts cycles per second and is the reciprocal of the period: T = 1/f — a first, concrete inverse relationship.

Try this

1.Have three students hum the same note into the scope and compare how tidy each wave looks; then have one hum a breathy 'shh' so the class sees a periodic wave become a scribble.
2.Ask a student to slide from a low note to a high one and watch the Hz readout climb; pause when the number roughly doubles and connect that doubling to jumping up one octave.