What is prosody, and why it matters
Prosody is the melody of speech — the rise and fall of pitch, the rhythm, the pauses, the pace. It's separate from word choice: the same sentence can sound confident, bored, or anxious depending purely on how it's delivered. Listeners pick up on prosody almost instantly, often before consciously processing the words themselves, which is why it has an outsized effect on how engaging, credible, or persuasive a speaker sounds.
What this tool measures
Pitch range
The spread between your typical low and high pitch, measured in semitones — a wider range generally reads as more expressive.
Expressiveness
How much your pitch varies moment to moment relative to your average — low variation reads as monotone.
Pauses
Silent gaps of at least 300ms, detected from the energy envelope — their number and placement shape pacing and emphasis.
Speaking pace
A rhythmic-peak estimate from the energy envelope, giving a rough sense of how quickly you're speaking.
How the pitch contour is built
The recording is split into overlapping ~64ms frames. Each voiced frame's fundamental frequency is estimated using autocorrelation, then filtered against a running median to reject octave errors and noise spikes — a real, tested signal-processing pipeline, not an approximation dressed up as one.