Singscope Music Functions User Guide

2. Open a Music

The Scales and Arpeggios folder contains a list of sheet music for singing warm-ups and exercises purposes. Tap on an item to open it in the Scope.

When scope is opened for the first time, it shows the help screen. Tap on each tool to show a brief description of the tool. Or simply tap on the Next bottom and dismiss the help screen.

* If you'd like to see the help screen again, tap the Menu button on the top left corner, and select Help menu item.

On the scope page, there are three parts. From top to bottom, each part shows the folowing content respectively: the Sheet Music, the Waveform of your singing voice, and the Pitch Graph.

On pitch graph, the horizental axis represents time in units of beat defined on the sheet music. The vertical axis represents pitch in units of semitone. For each musical note described on the sheet music, its pitch and time postion is highlighted on the graph. Those highlight marks can be used as a reference when singing.

*1. On the horizental axis, each thick vertical grid line corrosponds to a bar line on the sheet music, and the labeled number is the measure number. Each thin vertical grid line represents the start time of a beat.

*2. The labels on the vertical axis include music names and octave numbers. For example, C4 means note C at 4th octave, which is corresponding to the middle C in piano keyboard. A4 is note A at 4th octave and has an exact pitch frequency of 440 Hz.

You can switch the music-note-name labels shown on the left- and right-hand-side of pitch graph. The labels on either side can be set separately. Simply tap and hold the music-note-name-label area on either side to invoke the popup menu.

*3. Among the six supported music note names shown above, the last four are Movable-Do type, where the key note is determined from the key signature in the sheet music.

*4. On a 4 inch or smaller screen, the sheet music and the waveform won't show at the same time. The show or hide of these two windows can be set by the popup menu from the Menu button, located on top-left corner of the screen.

4. Mixer Panel

The mixer panel contains three sections: Input, Mixer, and Output.

The Input section shows the active microphone used by the app. If the microphone device supports manual gain adjustment, the Input Gain Slider can be used for adjusting the sensitivity of microphone. The slider may not be available for devices that utilize automatic gain control.

The Mixer section includes three channels:

Melody channel is for instrument playback according to the music notes described on the sheet music.

Chord channel is for instrument playback according to the chord symbols marked on the sheet music. For vocal exercise purpose, we play chord notes in a pattern just to give you a cue for the tones and beats that you are about to practice.

Vocal channel is for playback of your singing voice recording.

The Output section shows the active playback device used by the app. For iPhone, there is a switch in this section for selecting playback output channel, either to Speaker, or to Receiver (the earpiece when you use iPhone as a handset during a phone call).

*1. The settings for all three channels are applied when the Play function is active. When the Microphone function is active and picking up your singing voice, the instrument sound is playback at the same time, and the settings of Melody and Chord channels are applied for this instrument sound playback.

*2. When you are singing and recording with Microphone function without using earphones or headphones, it is recommeded to use Receiver to avoid playback of instrument sound being picked up by the microphone and interfere the analysis of your singing voice. If you'd still like to use the Speaker for playback, please turn down the volume to be as small as possible.

Bluetooth headsets, including AirPods, are supported for iOS 10 and later. The connected Bluetooth headset will be used for audio playback only. Due to the limitation of audio sample rate of Bluetooth microphones, the app will still use iPhone/iPad built-in microphone to pick up your voice even if the Bluetooth headset is connected.

The Bluetooth audio delay could cause vocal and instruments channels to be out of sync. In the app, we include extra code to compensate this latency and make them in sync again. The default latency time is derived from the related information provided by the operating system. Depending on the manufactures and models, this information may not be accurate for all of Bluetooth headsets. To view and adjust the compensating latency time used in the app, tap the bluetooth button on the right hand side of the Bluetooth device name in the output section.

Different Bluetooth headset brand and model may have different latency time. If you use a Bluetooth headset and notice a signifcant sync issue, you can improve the condition by adjusting this "Latency" setting.

*3. It could be tricky to find out a good latency time setting. If you know the exact location of the active microphone on your iPhone or iPad, you can do the calibration by following steps: (1) connect the Bluethooth headset and open a sheet music; (2) put one Bluetooth headphone to be as close to the microphone hole as possible; (3) start the recording and make sure the instrument sound played on the headphone can be picked up by the microphone; (4) record for a few seconds and then stop, rewind to the beginning of the recording; (5) check the start time of the first recorded sound, by dragging the window on the waveform to the location where audio singal starts. The exact time is shown on the status bar below the graph. The ideal start time should be between 0.07 to 0.09 second, which is tipical latency time when using built-in or corded microphone and speaker/headphones. Adjust the "Latency" in the "Bluetooth Device" setting such that, after compensating, the first recorded sound start time is around 0.08 second.

6. Sheet Music Page

Tap the Sheet Music button to maximize the sheet music window to fill most of the workspace.

In this sheet music page view, you can pan-and-zoom the page using typical touch gestures such as drag and pinch. Most Singscope functions, including Microphone and Play, are still accessible in this view.

8. Review Recordings

On the first screen when you launch Singscope, besides the Contents tab that we mentioned eariler in this guide, there are 3 additional tabs: Recents, Saved, and Deleted. These tabs holds the previously recorded singing voices.

To switch to the Recents folder, simply tab the Recents tab icon. All newly recorded singing voices are kept in this folder temporarily. To review an item, just tap on it, and the item will be opened in the Singscope view, where you can see the graph and play the voice again.

Go back to the Recent folder. Here you can also save, share, rename , or delete an item. Simply slide the item leftward or rightward to reveal the operation buttoms. Saved recordings are kept in the Saved folder. Deleted recordings are moved to the Deleted folder.

* Older recordings in Deleted and Recents folders may be discarded to make space available for the new one when you make a new recording.

To share or export a recording item, slide the item rightward and then tap the Share button. Then, on the popup, you can choose AirDrop, Save to Files, or choose an App to share the recording file.

How to Share a Recording File

* The shared recording file is with file extension .singscope. It is actually a zip file that contains an audio file in CAF format. You can simply unzip the file to retrieve the CAF audio file. If your computer does not recognize the file as zip, you can rename the file extension to .zip.