Documentation

Using Tunagram well

Getting started

A fresh install shows an empty library — that's by design; Tunagram ships with no songs. On a Mac, import via File → Import Songs… or drop an audio file onto the library; on an iPad, use the + at the foot of the library. Separation and melody analysis run on the device itself, so the first look at a new song takes a little while; after that it opens instantly.

You're asked for the microphone the first time you sing — listening never opens the mic. If you dismiss the prompt by accident, re-enable it under System Settings → Privacy & Security → Microphone on a Mac, or Settings → Privacy & Security → Microphone on an iPad.

Sing with speakers — that's the designed default. Tunagram mutes the guide vocal while you're being scored, because an in-tune guide reaching the microphone would be scored as you singing perfectly, and the backing over speakers is fine: the app measures your audio route's delay continuously and corrects the whole take for it. If you want the guide vocal in your ears while you sing, wear one ear on, one ear off — with both ears covered you can't hear your own voice properly, and intonation drifts exactly where you're trying to improve it.

Reading the display

The horizontal lines are semitones. The teal contour is the melody — the song's own vocal line, traced from the recording you imported, glides and all. The faint blocks behind it are the notes the judge scores. Your voice draws as a second trace, and its colour is a verdict:

Verdict	From the note	What it means
Perfect	≤ 20¢	Centred. For nearly any listener this is simply the note.
Close	21–40¢	Slightly off-centre — audible on a sustained note, passable in motion.
Nearly	41–75¢	Recognisably the right note, noticeably out of tune.
Off	> 75¢	Closer to a different note than to this one.
Not sung	—	The note played and no pitched singing came back.

A flick of amber or red at the start of a note is the arrival — brief, real, and usually musical; watching it turn green as you land is the feedback. Colour that stays off through the body of a held note is what deserves attention. Between notes there is no colour at all, because there is no verdict: the slides you make from note to note were never targets, and Tunagram never scores them.

Two colour rules the app never breaks: teal always means the melody, never a verdict — and once the playhead clears a note, the note keeps its verdict's colour, so the roll you just sang doubles as the score sheet.

Reading the score

The number out of 100 is a tally of note verdicts, not an average over every instant — a frame average would count each slide between notes as an error, and a singer moving between notes has to pass through the space in between. Octaves fold: a line written for another voice, sung correctly in your own octave, scores as correct.

One honest caveat: a score is a claim about one song's melody. Compare your tries on the same song — a 62 on one song and a 62 on another are not the same claim, because no two reference recordings are equally clean.

Practising with it

The failure mode of any visual feedback tool is that you start singing to the screen. The pitch that looks right and the pitch that feels connected to a phrase are not always the same thing, and a singer who watches the trace continuously will eventually start making small corrective adjustments that damage the line.

A more useful pattern: sing the phrase with your attention on the music, then look. Use the roll to answer a question you already had — am I under on that top note? — rather than as a continuous scoreboard. And remember that Tunagram measures a narrow slice of what makes singing good. Nothing it displays has anything to say about whether the phrase meant something.