CognitiveDrill

Hearing Tests

Four audio tasks, each giving one number, and a plain account of what a browser cannot tell you about your ears.

Start with what this is not. None of these pages is a hearing test in the medical sense. They cannot detect hearing loss, they cannot rule it out, and nothing here is a diagnosis. If you are worried about your hearing, see a doctor or an audiologist.

What a browser can do is play a sound whose pitch is exactly known and ask you a question about it. That covers more than it sounds like.

The perfect pitch test plays one note with nothing to compare it against and asks you to name it. The relative pitch test plays two and asks how far apart they were.

The tone deaf test plays two tones that are nearly the same and closes the gap until you cannot tell them apart. The hearing frequency test climbs a ladder of tones and finds where your equipment and your ears together run out.

The difference between those two halves is worth holding on to. Pitch survives any playback chain intact, because the note is generated as a number and a cheap speaker cannot stretch it. Loudness does not survive at all, and loudness is what decides whether a faint tone is heard.

So the first three pages measure something about you. The last one measures your headphones at least as much, and it leads with that rather than burying it.

The 4 tests in this domain

Notes named correctlyPerfect Pitch TestA note plays with nothing to compare it against. Name it on the keyboard before the clock runs out.%Intervals named correctlyRelative Pitch TestTwo notes, a different starting pitch every time, one question. How far apart were they?%Highest tone clearedHearing Frequency TestYour speakers hit their ceiling before your ears do. This page measures the whole chain and says so.kHzPitch difference thresholdTone Deaf TestTwo tones, one after the other. Say which was higher. The gap keeps closing until you cannot tell.cents

Pitch, intervals and the limit of hearing are three different things

These tests look alike from the outside and measure almost nothing in common.

Naming a note on its own is absolute pitch, and it is rare. Naming the gap between two notes is relative pitch, and almost everyone has some of it. Hearing that two nearly identical notes differ is finer again, and it is the resolution of the system rather than any kind of knowledge.

The upper limit is different from all three. It is not about telling sounds apart at all. It is the frequency above which a tone stops arriving, and where it stops depends on your equipment before it depends on you.

Someone can be excellent at one of these and ordinary at the rest. That is the usual result rather than a strange one.

Why sound is easier to be honest about than time

The auditory reaction time test has a problem these pages do not. It measures the gap between a sound and your press. A Bluetooth headset can add a tenth of a second to that gap without telling anybody.

Nothing in this hub is timed to the millisecond. A note either is a C or it is not, and the delay before it arrives changes nothing. Bluetooth is harmless here.

What replaces it is a quieter problem. A tone at the edge of hearing is not simply present or absent. Asking someone whether they can still hear it has no wrong answer. That is why the frequency test hides the tone in one of two windows and asks which. Guessing is then right half the time and no more.

Why these pages rank nobody

Every other hub on this site places your number against a distribution and names where it came from. This one does not, on any page, and the reason is different each time.

Note naming has been measured, and the largest sample found two clumps rather than a curve. Interval naming is measured constantly inside trained samples, which are not a population. The upper limit has excellent published thresholds, all of them taken through a calibrated headset in a treated room.

In each case a percentile would be borrowing a number from a measurement of something else. So these pages report your figure, state what guessing would score, and stop there.

What none of these numbers mean

A good score here means you did well at a small audio task in a browser, on this equipment, on this day. It is not a measure of musical ability and it is not a measure of your hearing.

Nothing in this hub detects, screens for or rules out any condition. Practice will move the pitch numbers, and what improves is the task you practised.

  • Your headphones and your volume setting are inside every figure here.
  • A quiet room is worth more than better equipment on most of these.
  • Your own earlier runs on the same setup are the only fair comparison.
  • Anything about your hearing that worries you belongs with a doctor.