• What's with the name?
• Why does the display sometimes show a wrong fundamental frequency when speaking/singing very low?

VRRRP!! is derived from 'VRP', which is the abbreviation for 'Voice Range Profile'. It can be pronounced in several ways, which in itself is quite educative when monitored by this very software. The 'R' can be pronounced in various ways, and it can be voiced or not. Since the word VRRRP!! does only consist of consonants, the dynamic range within which it can be pronounced is naturally limited. (That is a phenomenon that particularly aspiring singers have to cope with).

The pitch detection algorithm used in the software is very accurate. It is based on the work of Paul Boersma (Accurate short-term analysis of the fundamental frequency and the harmonics-to-noise ratio of a sampled sound), and has been adapted for speedy computation in real-time. There are some situations where the algorithm could arrive at faulty pitch estimates:

• When the microphone used for data acquisition has a poor quality, it acts as a high-pass filter and low frequencies are not recorded very well. This is particularly a problem when using built-in micprohones of laptop computers. - The obvious solution is to use a better microphone.
• If the actual pitch of the input signal is really very low, the audio input buffer might be too small to contain enough information to determine the real pitch. The audio input buffer should be big enough to contain at least three periods of the recorded sound. - In the section for audio options (Menu: Options/Audio), try to decrease the sampling rate (it is not recommended enter values lower than 11 kHz), or increase the audio input buffer size (the larger the buffer size, the slower the program will become; hence, it is not recommended to supply values larger than 4096).