The bottom line
Pitch is more fun with headphones. Wired ones work best, but Bluetooth works great too.
You can use the app without headphones, but you won’t get scored.
Use the app in a quiet space if you can.
The whole story
When you do a song Pitch does two things: it plays music and listens to you sing. The audio it hears comes from your phone’s microphone. It analyzes this audio to determine what words you're singing.
But – your phone doesn’t just hear your voice. It also hears all the background noise. This includes the music coming from your phone speaker. All that background noise piles on top of your voice and make it really hard to hear what words you're singing.
With headphones though, the music from your phone doesn’t get blasted into the world. It goes straight to your ears. Now the audio your microphone picks up is much more clean! Pitch hears you much better this way.
You can always use the app without headphones, but you won’t get scored.
So that takes care of the background noise coming from the music, but what about all those other background sounds? Car horns, dog barks, TV shows, etc. Pitch can handle these for the most part, but we recommend using the app in a quiet space if you can. The less background noise, the better we can hear your voice!
Wired headphones work best because they have microphones that hang close to your mouth. Bluetooth works great too just remember to connect your phone to them before opening Pitch.