YouTube has developed a new video device that allows you to sing alongside Freddie Mercury to see how well you can hold up against the singer. It’s called the FreddieMeter and it measures in percentages just how close you sound like Mercury.

The people at Entertainment Weekly did what anyone would likely think to do in this situation and plugged in footage of Rami Malek singing as Mercury from the 2018 film “Bohemian Rhapsody.” However, the results were very surprising.

Malek won the Academy Award for his portrayal as the Queen frontman and even worked with the band itself to perfect his voice and showmanship. However, the FreddieMeter disagrees. Once paired with Malek’s behind the scenes live performance of the titular song, the device spat out a 48% similarity score. The score is broken up into three other categories, judging on pitch, melody and timbre.

Malek’s singing got a 28 in pitch, 17 in melody and 97 in timbre. The “timbre” measurement is based solely on how similar a person sounds to Mercury, which checks out, considering how well Malek did in the movie. The other two, however, are a different story. Pitch is “how well you hit the notes,” and melody is “how well you hit the notes in relation to each other.” Unfortunately for Malek, these scores were far less satisfactory.

Rami Malek
At the 73rd Golden Globe Awards on Jan. 10, "Mr. Robot" star Rami Malek was dapperly dressed in head-to-toe Dior and accessorized with a Montblanc watch and cuff links. REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni

The Mercury Phoenix Trust, which is dedicated to combatting HIV and AIDS, partnered with YouTube to create this vocal skill test. According to the description, the FreddieMeter “analyzes your singing using machine learning models that have been trained on the original studio tapes of Freddie singing.”

It’s worth noting that background noise such as camera movements, noise, and the shouting crowd could have affected the overall score when it comes to Malek though.

RELATED STORIES