Reviewer, 2008-05-15 08:33:00

Canta shows you in real time the pitch of the note you sing so you can compare it to the note of the melody played by the included MIDI player. You see immediately whether you are in tune, and if not in what way you need to fix your voice.

Pros: Canta provides direct visual feedback as to whether you are able to produce the right notes. As this is real-time, one can adjust voice to generate the right pitch and rhythm. How this works is a MIDI monophonic file is used as a reference. This shows up in the display area as green colored bar to indicate the right notes. When you sing through the microphone the notes are indicated as a red line overlapping these green bars. Depending on if the red line goes above the bars or below one need to adjust the singing to correct the mismatch. Thus there is no need to know the musical notations. When you are able to match the MIDI notes you are in tune. Practicing a tune with this visual feedback lets one get the right singing pith and rhythm very quickly. The user interface is simple and designed to be easy. The basic controls are related to finding a MIDI file through browsing by the windows explorer and the player controls such as the usual play/pause and stop buttons. There’s a small display area that shows the current status such as paused/stopped or playing, a timers shows the duration for which the file has been playing. There’s an indicator that shows the difference in terms of semitone, a semitone is half a tone less than an octave. In the main display area the green bars are the song bars.

Clicking on these starts the play from that bar again from paused/stopped mode; thereby one can play sections repeatedly at the point where the user is facing a problem.

Cons: One have to be able to locate the monophonic MIDI files for the songs one wants to practice. This may take some effort.

Overall this is an interesting way of providing visual feedback to train someone’s appropriate singing. It has a fairly easy to use interface. The application is very good and deserves a 3 star rating without a doubt.