Tone Coach

Tone Coach

round 5:00 · 0/0

First, your voice range

Say a low, relaxed "aaa"

Hold it for about a second, like a tired sigh at the bottom of your voice. Tap the button, speak, and it stops by itself.

Low note: not yet · High note: not yet

Why: the app judges the shape of your pitch against your low and high notes, not against fixed frequencies.

妈

mā

mom

TONE 1 · HIGH LEVEL

target shapeyounative (after Listen)

Tap, say it once, and wait. It stops on its own.

Judge a recording file

Round done

Five minutes. That counts.

0tries

0right

0almost

How it judges, and how much to trust it

Everything runs on this device: the microphone signal goes through a pitch tracker (YIN, 16 kHz), the contour is scaled to your calibrated low and high notes, and simple shape rules decide: flat and high = tone 1, rising = 2, low dip = 3, sharp fall = 4. Nothing is uploaded.

Tested on the kit's native recordings: isolated syllables were accepted 15 of 16 times and the wrong tone was rejected 46 of 48 times. Tone pairs are rougher: 34 of 40 words accepted, and about 1 wrong tone in 8 slips through, mostly a rising 2nd tone passing as a 3rd. Treat the verdict as a mirror, not a teacher: when it says "again" three times in a row, listen to the native recording and compare the shapes yourself.

Syllables with "sh", "zh", "r" and creaky low 3rd tones are the hardest for the tracker. A quiet room and the phone about 20 cm from your mouth help most.

Reference audio: audio-cmn (CC BY-SA), syllables by Chen Wang, words by Yue Tan, curated by Hugo Lopez. Word list from the POLYGLOT Anki phonetics kit (deck 05c Tone pairs).