Guided practice

Practice (the hash URL is #practice) is a coached live-microphone loop: you work through a short session of exercises, get live feedback you can dial up or down, and finish each take with an ear-first recap. It is built around a simple idea — you should be able to practice by ear, not glued to a gauge — so the feedback is designed to fade as you improve.

For microphone and privacy requirements, and how the saved take differs from the live numbers, see Live microphone preview. For what each exercise trains, see Exercises.

Today's session

When a session plan is available, a stepper across the top shows the rungs of today's session. Each rung is a stage:

• Warmup — gentle onset, no scoring pressure.
• Drill — targeted work on one dimension (e.g. pitch or brightness).
• Phrase — carrying the target into connected speech.
• Carryover — speaking naturally with the gauges off, so the target transfers to real conversation.

Rungs show done (✓), active, or upcoming. You advance by saving or discarding a take. A switch to free practice link lets you step off the plan at any time (free practice keeps the classic single-exercise behaviour); the rail stays visible so you can rejoin. Plan progress is per-visit only and is never saved.

Choosing what to work on

A sticky transport bar holds an Exercise selector ("Free practice" plus the app's exercises), a live status and input-level readout, and Start / Stop.

Live gauges and feedback fading

The centre of the surface is the Live gauges hero, with two controls:

• Which gauges — Pitch / Resonance / Both. Your choice is remembered per surface.
• Feedback fading — the flagship control:
  • Guide — gauges fully shown.
  • Glance — gauges dimmed ("hover to peek, or trust your ear").
  • Blind — gauges replaced by a calm "Just you and your ear" card with a breathing dot.

Feedback mode is remembered per surface. Carryover stages force Blind and lock the control — the point of carryover is to leave the gauges behind. Your scoring tallies accrue in every mode, so fading the display never costs you credit for the take.

The gauges themselves are 270° arcs:

• Live pitch — a solid needle for the live value and a faint tick for your running median, with the arc colouring green in-band, amber just outside, and blue well below. See Pitch.
• Resonance · dispersion — a rolling-median marker with a p25–p75 uncertainty band (not a twitchy needle). It reads "Stabilizing…" until it has heard enough voiced sound. Resonance is formant dispersion in hertz — never a 0–100 score. See Formants.

Exercise contour and cue

Drill and phrase exercises that define a target contour add a strip that overlays the target contour (mint) with your live trace (amber) on a shared exercise-time axis, plus a running "on contour N%". A cue card shows an external-focus coaching prompt for the exercise ("brighter, like calling across a room") — the kind of image that works better than "raise your larynx".

Alongside, an aside shows the active exercise, your pitch target and resonance target bands (with their provenance and an edit target link into Settings), a running This session tally, and duration / voiced-percent / input meters. A short live pitch trace shows the last several seconds. When the live estimator has two plausible octave readings, the gauge holds its contextual value briefly instead of flickering, but the trace shows a gap labelled as uncertain. Those uncertain frames do not count toward pitch-in-band time, the exercise contour score, or the take recap.

The take recap

Press Stop and the gauges are replaced by an ear-first recap, deliberately ordered so you judge by ear before you see any numbers:

1. Listen back first — a player on the take you just recorded. (If the audio has expired it says so honestly rather than failing silently.)
2. Rate it by ear — "How close did that sound to the voice you're building?" on a 1–5 scale ("not yet" … "that's her"). The numeric results stay blurred until you rate — or until you choose "show the numbers without rating".
3. The numbers — median pitch, formant dispersion, percent of pitch in band, resonance-in-zone (when targeted), and voiced time, plus a supportive delta versus your recent average ("Up 6 points from your recent 58% average"). The delta is never punitive, and has honest wording for your first take of an exercise or when recent data could not be loaded.

Then choose Discard or Save to practice log. Saved takes appear on Home in your recordings stream and progress chart. In a guided session, saving files the take and moves you to the next rung. A dropped connection mid-take still keeps the take — the recap is computed locally.

Saved scores and retention

Free practice reports the percentage of eligible pitch samples inside your goal band. Exercise takes instead use the exercise's full target span plus tolerance for the band summary, and also save exercise adherence: the percentage of scored frames within tolerance of the moving contour. The exercise ID and that same live adherence percentage stay with the saved take. Pitch onset and ambiguous frames are excluded consistently from adherence on both live surfaces.

Live resonance uses the live_lpc_f1_f3_v1 estimator, recorded with each take. Exercises whose live estimate is not calibrated to their offline target remain unscored. The pitch ring and trace expand to include high exercise targets.

In the installed app, the practice log retains the newest 500 records. A save that exceeds this limit reports how many oldest records were removed, and the server logs a warning. The browser version keeps every practice record until you delete it. Studio loads every session page, so older sessions remain available for Compare.