Weeks 3-4 · voice · controlled tone release
Sustain a tone. End it without a click or a whoosh.
The rule
pass: 4/5self-rated “smooth”
Same plateau, three different tails. The emerald taper rolls from full tone to silence over roughly half a second — that’s a smooth release. The grey cliff is an abrupt cutoff: vocal folds slammed shut, audible click. The dashed grey wobble is breath tail: voicing stopped before air did, leaving an “h” hanging in the air.
Hear it first
Three reference releases. Listen for the boundary between tone and silence — on a smooth release you almost can’t locate it. On a cliff you hear a tiny click. On a wobble you hear breath outlast the pitch.
What’s happening. Release is offset coordination — the inverse of onset. Vocal folds and airflow should disengage together. Abrupt releases happen when fold closure outpaces airflow decay (you slam shut). Breathy tails happen when airflow outlasts fold closure (air leaks after voicing ends). The skill is a roughly 300-500 ms exponential decay where both subside in proportion.
Why self-rated.Mic-based detection of release shape is unreliable across consumer hardware — abrupt and smooth differ by ~30 ms of envelope tail, well below most setups’ floor. Your ear is faster and more accurate. The 2-second sustain window keeps the test about the release itself, not whether you can hold a tone.
Why this is the foundation.Every phrase ends with a release. Smooth-release is the bookend to coordinated-onset: together they bracket every sung note. Breath-grouping for phrases, dynamic swells, and consonant clarity at phrase-ends all assume you can stop a tone cleanly. Lock this here so downstream phrasing doesn’t end with a click.
Session ahead
5 trials · sustain /a/ for 2 s · release on prompt · self-rate smooth/breathy/abrupt · hit 4 smooth to advance.