Improve Your Singing With the Tone App for iOS

Tone is almost silly in its simplicity. Load it up, admire the pretty sine wave on its main screen, and tap the play icon. Turn your sound on (or crank it up, as the app advises) and tap the check mark to get started.

To begin, tone plays a note. You try to guess the note’s name from an unchanging list of options. Tone plays more notes. You keep guessing.

You score points every time you correctly pick the note being played. Once you hit mistake number three, it’s game over, and back you go to the main menu. (Though Tone does encourage you to brag about any high scores you achieve by giving you an easy way to post your progress to Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.)

If you want to adjust the game’s parameters, the settings menu in the upper-right corner of its main screen lets you pick between note names and solfège (think “Doe, a deer, a female deer,” and the endless examples that follow). You can also elect to display a virtual piano on the guessing screen instead of just note names, which is super-useful for visualizing intervals.

You can customize which notes Tone uses in its tests—notes that come from a “Base 5″ category, the major scale, the minor scale, the full Chromatic scale, or a custom set of notes you select. You can pick from low, medium, or high octaves for the sounds Tone emits and, if you really want to challenge yourself, you can adjust the amount of time you’re allowed to think about your selection before you make it.