Average voice pitch: men, women and children in Hz and musical notes

The average adult male speaking voice is about 115 Hz, near the note A#2, and the average adult female speaking voice is about 199 Hz, near G3. Those figures come from a study of 379 adults reading aloud, and individual voices vary widely around them. To find your own number, take the free voice pitch test, which takes about 10 seconds.

What is the average voice pitch for men and women?

In the best recent study we could verify, Leung, Oates, Papp and Chan (2022) measured 135 male and 244 female adult speakers of Australian English, aged 18 to 60, reading a passage. The averages were 115 Hz for men (SD 21) and 199 Hz for women (SD 28), as listed in this Sydney Voice Lab reference sheet.

*The ± rows are our arithmetic from the published means and standard deviations, not ranges reported by the study. In a normal distribution, roughly two-thirds of people fall within 1 SD and about 95% within 2 SD.

The bottom row is the range given on Wikipedia, citing Baken's Clinical Measurement of Speech and Voice (2000). You will also see the male band starting at 85 Hz, including on our own pitch test; the difference is a rounding choice rather than a meaningful disagreement.

Three things are worth noticing:

• The gap is about 9.5 semitones. From 115 to 199 Hz is a little more than a major sixth.
• The ranges overlap. At ± 2 SD, the male and female bands share roughly 143 to 157 Hz, and real voices sit in that overlap.
• These are speech numbers. Singing range is much wider. See what is my vocal range for that.

What is the average pitch of a child's voice?

Before puberty, boys and girls have similar pitch, roughly 240 to 260 Hz in this data. In the teens, boys' voices drop sharply and girls' fall much less. The figures below come from Kent, Eichhorn and Vorperian (2021), who recorded 158 typically developing children.

An important caveat: these children were holding a sustained "ah," not talking, and each age group is small. Sustained-vowel figures are not directly comparable with the adult reading figures above, and published child norms differ from study to study. Treat the table as a picture of the pattern rather than a growth chart.

The timing of change varies too. A larger study of 335 children (Maturo et al., 2012) found discrete pitch changes at ages 11 and 14 in girls, and at 12 and 16 in boys. Hollien, Green and Massey (1994), who tracked 48 boys over five years, concluded that the onset and duration of voice change extend over a longer period than was once thought.

Voice pitch test: how do you measure your own pitch?

You can measure your speaking pitch in about 10 seconds with a microphone and a free tool. Our voice pitch test runs in your browser, and your audio never leaves your device. It reports your average pitch in Hz, the nearest note and your pitch range in semitones.

For a more reliable reading:

1. Use a quiet room (no background talk). Noise can confuse pitch tracking.
2. Read in your usual voice. A put-on voice measures the put-on voice.
3. Test three times (1 minute). Do this a few hours apart, and take the middle result.
4. Compare like with like. Reading, chatting and a sustained "ah" can give different numbers, so use the same task each time.

To turn any frequency into a note yourself, calculate 69 + 12 × log2(Hz ÷ 440) and round to the nearest whole number. That gives you a MIDI note number, where 60 is C4 (middle C) and 69 is A4. Or use this chart:

What affects your voice pitch?

Your sex and age have the most consistent effects, followed by language, the speaking task and your surroundings. Your own pitch is also fairly stable: speaking pitch reflects your anatomy and your habits, not just your mood on a given day.

Does pitch change as you get older?

Generally yes for women; for men it is less clear. Goy and colleagues (2013) found lower speaking pitch in older women than in younger women, but no difference between older and younger men. Nishio and Niimi saw a similar picture in 374 speakers. A rare long-term analysis by Reubold, Harrington and Kleber (2010) followed two speakers across 50 years: the woman's pitch fell, while the man's fell and then rose. Two people cannot prove a pattern, but it shows why a single male trend is hard to state.

Is there an average voice pitch by country?

No good global table exists, despite the search interest, because studies use different tasks, recording setups and analysis methods. Careful comparisons also show that the materials matter. Keating and Kuo (2012) found English and Mandarin speakers had nearly the same physical pitch range, yet Mandarin speakers used higher pitch in single words and a higher mean in prose. Any ranking that gives a single number per country deserves suspicion. The Leung figures above are from Australian English, so readers of other varieties should treat them as a close reference rather than a national norm.

Does reading give the same result as talking?

Largely, though not perfectly. Pisanski and colleagues (2021) measured 154 adults across vowels, words, counting, greetings, reading and free speech. A person who was relatively high in one type tended to be relatively high in the others, so a short reading is a fair way to find where you sit, even though the exact Hz can shift between tasks.

What is a good voice pitch?

There is no best pitch. A healthy speaking pitch is one you can sustain comfortably, which sits somewhere above the creak at the bottom of your voice. Being 10 Hz above or below an average says nothing about whether your voice is working well.

What people hear as a pleasant or authoritative voice also depends on resonance, pace, clarity and how much your pitch moves. Our guide to a more attractive voice covers this. Pitch range matters too, so if your test shows a flat range, try these drills for a monotone voice. In Voceris, depth is one of nine measures scored from 0 to 100, alongside resonance, clarity and stability, because no single number describes a voice.

If your search began with "masculine or feminine," note that the male and female bands overlap and that perceived gender depends on more than pitch, including resonance and speech patterns. A pitch number alone cannot tell you how a voice comes across.

Forcing your pitch down is not the answer if you want a lower voice. It usually strains the throat and tips you into creak. See how to make your voice deeper for relaxed, resonance-based methods, and chest voice vs head voice for how registers fit in.

When does a pitch change need checking?

A slow, lifelong trend is normal, but a sudden or unexplained change is not something to train around. Cleveland Clinic lists a voice that is softer or higher or lower than usual as part of hoarseness. NIDCD advises seeing a doctor if your voice has been hoarse for more than three weeks. An ENT doctor can examine your larynx, and a speech-language pathologist can work with you on how you use your voice.

Sources and method

Adult averages are from Leung et al. (2022): passage reading, with creaky phonation separated out, in 18 to 60 year olds. Child figures are from Kent et al. (2021): sustained vowels, ages 4 to 19. Hz figures in the child table are rounded to whole numbers. Nearest notes were calculated from the unrounded values using equal temperament with A4 = 440 Hz, so a value such as 254 Hz, which falls almost midway between B3 and C4, should not be read as precise.

Anyone citing this page should cite the original studies for the numbers. Last reviewed November 2026.