vocalrange

Registers · what the microphone can hear

Does vocal range count head voice?

Yes, on the same rule as every other note: hold it steadily for 2.0 s and it is entered, head voice or chest. A browser cannot hear which register you are in — it hears pitch, and pitch is all a microphone carries — so the honest answer is the same one falsetto gets. What the result does instead is separate what you held from what you only reached, so a head-voice top you can genuinely sustain reads differently from one you can only touch. If you want the chest-only number, run it twice and stop before you flip. Neither number is the real one; they answer different questions.

For scale, here are the 16 singers in the catalogue whose top sung note reaches C5, the top of the tenor band. What register any of them was in is not something a recording tells you, so the table names the note and stops there.

The singers who reach C5 or higher

Sorted by top note. The range is the sustained sung range across released recordings, with one-off squeaks left out.

Every singer in the catalogue whose top sung note is C5 or above.
SingerTop noteMIDISung rangeSpan
Janis JoplinA581D3–A52 octaves and 7 semitones
Whitney HoustonG579A2–G52 octaves and 10 semitones
Brendon UrieG579A#2–G52 octaves and 9 semitones
Christina AguileraG579C3–G52 octaves and 7 semitones
Lady GagaG579C#3–G52 octaves and 6 semitones
Ariana GrandeG579D3–G52 octaves and 5 semitones
Billie EilishG579D#3–G52 octaves and 4 semitones
Fiona AppleE576D3–E52 octaves and 2 semitones
CherE576F3–E51 octave and 11 semitones
Tina TurnerD#575D3–D#52 octaves and 1 semitone
Bruno MarsD574G#2–D52 octaves and 6 semitones
Lana Del ReyC#573C3–C#52 octaves and 1 semitone
Robert PlantC572F#2–C52 octaves and 6 semitones
Paul McCartneyC572G2–C52 octaves and 5 semitones
David BowieC572A2–C52 octaves and 3 semitones
Amy WinehouseC572C3–C52 octaves

Sing two notes