About Prima Vista
A sight-singing practice room that listens to you and marks every note — built by a music school that got tired of telling students to “just practice it at home”.
The problem it solves
Sight singing is the one musical skill that almost nobody practices alone, and the reason is embarrassingly practical: you cannot hear your own mistakes while you are making them. A student sings a line, it feels fine, and only a teacher in the room can say “that third was flat” or “you came in early on bar five”. So the skill gets practiced for forty minutes a week in a lesson, and not at all in between.
Prima Vista is that teacher's ear, available at two in the morning. You sing from real notation, the app listens through your microphone, and every note comes back marked — separately for pitch and for time, because they are different skills and conflating them tells you nothing useful.
What it judges, and what it does not
It is worth being precise, because a practice tool that flatters you is worse than none.
- Pitch — how far each sung note sat from the written one, in cents. A verdict per note, not an average.
- Time — where each note started relative to the beat, measured independently of pitch. Singing the wrong note in the right place still scores well for rhythm, because that is the truth.
- Steadiness — whether your tonal centre held across the page, or drifted. Singers go flat over a long line, almost universally, and almost never notice.
It does not judge tone, vowel, breath, musicality or interpretation. It has no opinion about whether your singing is beautiful. Those things need a human, and we would rather say so than pretend a microphone can hear them.
It also cannot read a PDF. A PDF is a picture of a page — there are no notes in it for a computer to compare against. Bring a PDF and you get the page on a stand with a count-off, a metronome and an honest report on how steadily you sang; bring MusicXML or MIDI and every note gets marked.
What it costs, and what it takes
Nothing, and nothing. There is no account, no sign-up and no payment. Your singing is analysed inside your browser and is never uploaded — there is no server that hears you. The exercises you have completed are remembered on your own device and nowhere else.
Where the music comes from
Three sources, all of them clear:
- 432 original exercises written for this app by Nathaniel School of Music, graded across thirteen units in both treble and bass clef.
- The classic books — Melodia (Cole & Lewis, 1909) and Somervell's One Thousand Exercises (1911), both long in the public domain, each exercise note-entered and carrying its original number.
- 80 four-part hymns, every served setting verified public domain.
Every single exercise resolves to a source record with a rights status you can read on the credits page. We check that automatically on every build, because “we think it's fine” is not a rights position.
Who made it
Nathaniel School of Music is a music school in Bengaluru, India, founded by Jason Zac. We teach piano, theory and musicianship, and we build our own tools when the ones that exist do not do the job. Prima Vista is one of those.