Bootcamp Day 3: Turning On Camera Coaching

Yesterday was about learning to read your stability score. Today adds a second stream of data to that same session: a camera.

The checkbox is easy to miss on purpose

Inside Coach Listens, look for a single checkbox: "Add camera coaching (mouth, posture and breathing)." It is off by default, and it stays off unless you check it, session by session. Nothing about your account changes when you check it, no permanent setting, no camera running in the background later. Check it, run one session, and it applies to that session only.

The first time you turn it on, it can feel a little strange, watching yourself sing on a webcam is not something most people do casually. That feeling fades fast, mostly because nothing about it is being recorded. The tracking runs entirely on your own device: no video is ever recorded, uploaded, or stored anywhere, only the resulting scores get kept. If your browser cannot use the camera, or you decline the permission prompt, the session just continues with audio only.

What it is actually scoring, briefly

Three things, and only three: your mouth shape, meaning how far your jaw drops on open vowels; your posture, meaning whether your head stays level or drifts into a sustained tilt; and your breathing, meaning whether your shoulders rise on the inhale, the visible tell of a shallower chest breath instead of a low one. We already wrote the deeper version of all three, including exactly how the on-device model tells a real habit from ordinary drift, in the post that introduced camera coaching and, for the breathing piece specifically, why shoulders are the signal a webcam can actually measure. Today is not the day to re-read all of that. Today is the day to just see your own numbers for the first time.

Today's task: one session, camera on, and actually read the report

Run one Coach Listens session with the camera checkbox on, and when it finishes, do not skim past the camera section of the report the way you might skim a terms-of-service page. Look at what percentage of the take your head spent tilted. Look at whether your mouth-shape ratio suggests you were singing through a mostly-closed jaw. Look at your breaths per minute and whether the report calls you a shoulder breather.

You do not need to fix anything yet, that is tomorrow's task specifically. Today is only about seeing the report clearly, once, with your full attention on it instead of your usual attention on just the pitch score.