Microphone

Are there any controls about for getting pitches, tones or vowel sounds
from microphones?

I don't want speech recognition but instead something that returns the
real-time state of the mike. So I _can't_ just have a word spelled "Ee"
and get it to recognise that.

It's so simple that it's elusive. I've checked the windows speech SDK
and so forth but it's all speech recognition.

~Iain