Tone Deaf Test

A semitone is the step from one piano key to the next, black or white. A cent is a hundredth of that step, and twelve semitones make an octave, so an octave is 1,200 cents.

The gap is counted this way because the ear works on ratios rather than on amounts. Five hertz between two low notes is an obvious jump. The same five hertz up near a whistle is nothing at all. Cents describe the ratio, so 20 cents means the same size of step wherever the notes sit.

The result card gives you both. The headline is the gap in cents, and under it is the same gap in hertz at the region you chose. Run the low setting and then the high one, and the cents figure may barely move while the hertz figure triples.

• 1,200 cents is an octave, the distance from one C to the next.
• 100 cents is one piano key, black or white.
• 20 cents is a fifth of a key, which is roughly where a typical run lands.

The phrase is nearly always about singing. Singing a note is two jobs, and only the first one is hearing. The second is making the muscles in your throat land on the note you are aiming at. That is a motor skill, closer to throwing a dart.

This test only asks about the first job. You never make a sound, so nothing here depends on your voice, your confidence or how you sound in a room. Plenty of people who cannot hold a tune land on a perfectly ordinary threshold.

There is a real and uncommon difficulty with pitch, and researchers call it congenital amusia. It is identified with a full battery of listening tasks, run and read by people who do this for a living. One page in a browser is not that battery, and this number cannot tell you whether you have it. If music has never made sense to you and you want an answer, that conversation belongs with a doctor.

The first pair is a semitone apart, which almost everyone hears easily. Two right answers in a row and the gap shrinks. One wrong answer and it grows again. The run walks itself down to the edge of what you can hear and then bounces along it.

A turn is a moment where the gap stops shrinking and starts growing, or the other way round. Those turns are the measurement. Your score is the middle of those turns rather than the last gap you heard. One gap is one answer, and a single answer can be luck.

This is also why the correct percentage on the card is not a mark. The rule parks everyone at roughly seven right answers in ten whatever their ear is like. A run at 70 per cent and one at 75 per cent are both working properly. The gap in cents is the part that differs between people.

The pause between the two tones is yours to set. Take it to 1.5 seconds and the first tone is gone before the second arrives. You are then comparing the new one against a memory. That is holding a sound in mind rather than hearing two things side by side. Most people give up 10 or 20 cents to it.

One thing here is unusually clean. Both tones are computed rather than recorded, so the ratio between them is exact whatever plays them. Cheap earbuds and a studio monitor deliver the same gap. A Bluetooth delay ruins the auditory reaction time test and does nothing at all to this one.

What does matter is everything around the sound. A noisy room hides a small gap. A volume set too low does the same. Headphones fix both, which is the only reason this page asks for them.

Hearing changes with age, and it changes unevenly across the range. This page has no age curve to put you on, because nobody has measured enough people this way. Reaction time is the opposite case, and average reaction time by age shows what a curve looks like when the measurements exist. Here, the closest thing to an answer is to run the low, middle and high settings and compare your own three numbers.

It is not a hearing test. A hearing test asks how quiet a sound can get before you lose it. That depends on the volume of your device, and it cannot be done honestly in a browser. This asks how close two clearly audible tones can get, which is a different question with a different answer.

It is not a musical ability score either. A fine threshold does not make anyone a better player, and a coarse one has never stopped anyone learning an instrument. Rhythm, memory and practice do far more work than this number does, which is part of why keeping time is measured on its own page.

Run this page ten times and your threshold will improve. That improvement is real and it belongs to this task. You have learned what the pair sounds like and where to put your attention. That is worth having, and it is not a change in your hearing.