Weeks 5-6 · range · self-awareness of passaggio crossings
Glide through your range. Notice exactly where the voice flips.
The rule
pass: self-count within ±1 of detector · 4/5
A pitch glide rising and falling. The dip in the emerald contour marks where the register event happens — an amplitude dip plus a clarity wobble, the acoustic signature of a passaggio crossing. The emerald correct-zone surrounds the actual event; the grey marker placed elsewhere on the timeline is a miss (off by more than one event). The skill being trained is identification, not elimination.
Hear it first
A siren with no break — voice stays voiced across the whole range. Then the same siren with one clear flip in the ascending leg — the kind that feels like a brief hiccup or tickle in the throat. Listen for what amplitude dip + tone-quality wobble sound like together — that signature is what you’ll be counting.
What’s happening.Per the source research, hard-gating which register you’re in (chest / mix / head) from audio alone is unreliable — but the break itself has a clean acoustic signature: a brief amplitude dip (≥ 6 dB) plus a tone-quality wobble (clarity drop or pitch jump of 30¢+). Most untrained singers feel a flip but can’t name where it happened; the detector catches one in roughly every two unforced sirens.
Why the ±1 tolerance.Asking you to count register events exactly would punish near-misses harshly — and most flips are ambiguous (was that a break or just an inflection?). Within ±1 of the detector means you’re reliably perceiving the right order of magnitude, which is what matters for self-diagnosis. The goal here isn’t to eliminate flips — that comes next in passaggio-siren — but to develop conscious awareness of them.
Why this is the bridge.Awareness of register flips is the prerequisite for passaggio-siren (eliminate them), vowel-modification-ascent (route around them), and straight-tone-vibrato (which assumes you can hold a steady register). If you can’t feel them, you can’t fix them.
Session ahead
5 trials · glide low → high → low on /u/ (6s) · the detector counts breaks, you report what you felt · pass = within ±1 · 4/5 to clear.