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.
| Singer | Top note | MIDI | Sung range | Span |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Janis Joplin | A5 | 81 | D3–A5 | 2 octaves and 7 semitones |
| Whitney Houston | G5 | 79 | A2–G5 | 2 octaves and 10 semitones |
| Brendon Urie | G5 | 79 | A#2–G5 | 2 octaves and 9 semitones |
| Christina Aguilera | G5 | 79 | C3–G5 | 2 octaves and 7 semitones |
| Lady Gaga | G5 | 79 | C#3–G5 | 2 octaves and 6 semitones |
| Ariana Grande | G5 | 79 | D3–G5 | 2 octaves and 5 semitones |
| Billie Eilish | G5 | 79 | D#3–G5 | 2 octaves and 4 semitones |
| Fiona Apple | E5 | 76 | D3–E5 | 2 octaves and 2 semitones |
| Cher | E5 | 76 | F3–E5 | 1 octave and 11 semitones |
| Tina Turner | D#5 | 75 | D3–D#5 | 2 octaves and 1 semitone |
| Bruno Mars | D5 | 74 | G#2–D5 | 2 octaves and 6 semitones |
| Lana Del Rey | C#5 | 73 | C3–C#5 | 2 octaves and 1 semitone |
| Robert Plant | C5 | 72 | F#2–C5 | 2 octaves and 6 semitones |
| Paul McCartney | C5 | 72 | G2–C5 | 2 octaves and 5 semitones |
| David Bowie | C5 | 72 | A2–C5 | 2 octaves and 3 semitones |
| Amy Winehouse | C5 | 72 | C3–C5 | 2 octaves |