Filery

Change Audio Pitch

Shift pitch in semitones. Speed and duration stay the same.

Choose audio filess or drop them anywhere on this page MP3 · WAV · OGG · OGA · M4A · AAC · FLAC · OPUS · WMA · AIFF · +4 Processed on your device — never uploaded

How to change audio pitch

  1. Add an audio file.
  2. Set the pitch shift in semitones. Positive numbers go up, negative go down.
  3. Export. The duration of the file is unchanged.

About this tool

Pitch and tempo are physically coupled in a simple rate change — play audio faster and both go up. Pitch shifting separates them using a phase-vocoder: the algorithm analyses the signal in the frequency domain, shifts the spectral content, and resynthesises at the original tempo. The result is a different pitch with the same duration.

The quality of phase-vocoder pitch shifting is good for small shifts and degrades for large ones. On vocal material, a shift of two or three semitones is usually clean. At six semitones the formant structure of the voice starts to shift along with the pitch in a way that sounds artificial — the vowels take on a different character. At twelve semitones the artefacts are pronounced on most material. For creative voice effects this is sometimes the point; for transparent transposing, keep shifts small.

Questions

How many semitones is one octave?
Twelve. The full range here is ±12 semitones, which is ±1 octave. Large shifts introduce more artefacts — shifting by more than 4–5 semitones starts to produce audible smearing or metallic colouring on most material. Shifting by 1–2 semitones to transpose a song into a more singable key is clean on most hardware.
What is this useful for?
Transposing a song to a different key to match a vocalist's range. Correcting a slightly sharp or flat instrument recording. Creating a harmonised vocal layer by duplicating a track and pitching one copy up 3–5 semitones. Simple voice effects, though extreme shifts (±6 semitones or more) will sound heavily processed.
How is this different from just slowing down or speeding up the audio?
Slowing down lowers pitch but also changes duration. Pitch shifting isolates the pitch operation: duration stays exactly the same. The underlying algorithm (a phase-vocoder) does the same time-frequency analysis as the tempo-preserve option in the speed tool, just applied differently.