Seeing the Highest Note Ever Sung
At Simply, I spend most of my time fine-tuning our note recognition engine to provide our learners real time feedback on their playing. Singer Eden Alene’s record-breaking performance at the Eurovision Song Contest last weekend is a good excuse to share what some of our work looks like.
Several attention-worthy events happened at the 2021 Eurovision song contest, and I’m not just talking about the latest scandal around the Italian winners and their predilections. Besides the sequins, smoke machines, ballads and bops, singer Eden Alene set a new record, hitting the highest note ever sung in the flashy song contest — B6!
For music geeks like myself (and many others working with me at Simply), this was more than an impressive event — Not because I’m a devoted Eurovision fan (I’d prefer Jaja Ding Dong), but because my work entails perfecting our note recognition engine for the millions of people who rely on its accuracy to learn piano with our app Simply Piano. The more accurate our ability to recognize the notes they play, the better learning experience they’ll have.
As a physicist and a musician, I am fascinated with what we are doing, but most people have a hard time understanding the graphs that we produce daily. So it’s refreshing to be able to share a graph that most of us can appreciate!
This is what it looks like to sing a B6 note:
The graph above is a spectrogram of Eden Alene’s voice registering the B6. A spectrogram is an essential way to represent audio, widely used by scientists, engineers, musicians, and more. It might look scary at first, but it’s actually quite intuitive: The x-axis measures time, while the y measures pitch (frequency). So, Eden reaching for her high note, followed by lower pitched notes, manifests in the spectrogram as the bright orange trajectory on the right, going first up, then down.
We can also think of it using the standard piano keyboard. Any musical note is defined by the “fundamental frequency” which measures how fast its sound waves vibrate. From that perspective, a piano keyboard is actually a frequency “ruler” — each key has it’s unique frequency, which gets higher for right keys and lower for left:
In the middle of the ruler is middle C (C4), which is the first note taught to every aspiring pianist. Middle C is also at the middle of the average human singing range, and can be sung by most singers, bass through soprano. B6, however, is almost an octave higher than the standard soprano range, ending at C6 (B after C? Confusing, I know, but that’s for another day).
A famous high note in classical music is the F6 in Mozart’s famous Queen of the Night Aria from the opera The Magic Flute. But F6 is still 3 tones lower than B6 (3 white keys to the left).
Several singers throughout history have claimed the title of breaking the highest note such record. Most recent is Georgia Brown, who holds the Guinness record for “World’s Greatest Vocal Range by a Female G2-G10” and “World’s Highest Note “G10”.
Although the title of the video claims she reaches G10, I checked and in the above recording she only reaches A#7, lower by 3 octaves. That is an impressive full octave higher than Eden, and we’re left wondering what that G10 sounds like (hint: its frequency is 25.1KHz which is out of hearing range for nearly every human).
The Eurovision Song Contest also has a category for “highest hat” which, alas, doesn’t translate well to spectrogram, yet. One can dream.
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Oded Zewi is a DSP lead at Simply and in his free time plays the trumpet in a Big Band and teaches teenagers physics. Stay tuned for additional posts that will explore what the day-to-day at Simply looks like and check out our open roles.
