High frequency hearing test how high can you still hear?

How to do a high frequency hearing test online

The test works in three steps. First you set the volume with a 1,000 Hz tone: choose a level that is clearly audible but comfortable, well below loud, and do not touch the volume again. Then a tone rises from 8,000 Hz to 22,000 Hz over 40 seconds, and you press the button the moment you can no longer hear it. You do this three times, and the middle of the three readings is your result. The middle value is used because one try is often off: a cough, a lapse of attention or a nervous early press. Separate single tones from 8 to 20 kHz let you check any frequency on its own.

Use wired or good wireless headphones, not a phone or laptop speaker, and sit in a quiet room. Small built-in speakers often lose the highest treble long before your ears do, so a speaker result tells you more about the speaker than about you.

Press when the tone is truly gone, not when it starts to fade. Near your limit a high tone gets thinner and quieter before it disappears. Because the tone keeps rising while your finger moves, a slow reaction gives a slightly higher number; three tries smooth this out.

Be clear about what this is: a rough self-check of the top of your hearing range. It is not a medical hearing test, and the result depends on your headphones, the volume and the room. A real hearing test, an audiogram, measures how quietly you can hear many frequencies in each ear with calibrated equipment.

Hearing range by age: what does your result mean?

The best recent reference for a result like yours comes from Wang and colleagues (2021), who tested 162 healthy adults aged 21–70, all with normal standard audiograms, at every frequency from 9 to 20 kHz. Everyone under 30 responded up to 16 kHz, and 52.2 % heard 20 kHz. From the 31–40 group onwards, thresholds above 8 kHz began to worsen, and the highest audible frequency fell with every age group. Nobody aged 51–60 responded to 20 kHz, and nobody aged 61–70 responded even to 18 kHz.

Read your number against this pattern, not as a pass or fail. If you are 45 and the tone vanishes at 15 kHz, that fits the normal decline. If you are 25 and it vanishes at 12 kHz, try other headphones first; if the result stays low, it is a reason to get a proper hearing test.

Remember that all these people had normal standard audiograms: losing 18 or 20 kHz did not show up as hearing loss in an ordinary clinical test.

What frequency can humans hear?

Humans hear roughly from 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz. That textbook human hearing frequency range describes young, healthy ears listening to tones loud enough; there is considerable variation between people, especially at the top, and a gradual loss of the highest frequencies with age is considered normal. Sound below about 20 Hz is called infrasound, and sound above 20 kHz, the approximate upper limit for healthy young adults, is called ultrasound. Very low tones near 20 Hz are partly felt as vibration in the body rather than heard as a clear pitch.

The range also depends on how loud the test tone is. In one laboratory study, seven people listening through loudspeakers at a fixed 60 dB heard from 31 Hz to 17.6 kHz, with their best sensitivity at 2 and 4 kHz (Jackson, Heffner and Heffner, 1999). Turn the tone up and the range widens; turn it down and it shrinks. That is why online results, where the actual sound level is unknown, can only be approximate.

The ear is far from equally sensitive across this range. It is sharpest between about 2,000 and 5,000 Hz. Part of the reason is simple physics: the adult ear canal is a tube about 25 mm long, closed at one end by the eardrum, and such a tube resonates at a quarter wavelength, around 3.4 kHz by calculation. Hearing research describes this ear canal resonance in the 2–4 kHz region and links it to a peak near 3 kHz in sounds the ear itself produces. The international standard for equal loudness, ISO 226:2023, shows the other side of this: very low and very high tones need much more sound pressure to sound as loud as mid tones.

Hearing test frequencies: who can hear 8, 12, 16, 18 and 20 kHz?

Each high frequency sound has its own story. The single tones in the test let you check them one by one; this chart shows what the studies and official texts say about each. The wavelength column shows how short these sounds are in air, at about 343 m/s at 20 °C.

A larger study of 645 healthy people aged 5 to 90 (Rodríguez Valiente and colleagues, 2014) found the same overall picture: the higher the frequency and the older the person, the more volume was needed to hear it.

Why do we lose high frequency hearing with age?

Losing the highest tones with age is so common that it has a name, presbycusis, and so normal that international standards build it in. ISO 7029:2017 gives the expected hearing thresholds of otologically normal people aged 18 to 80 for 125 Hz to 8,000 Hz, and, for information, medians from 9,000 to 12,500 Hz for ages 22 to 80. It does not give one highest audible frequency per age, because people differ too much for that.

What surprises most people is how early the decline starts. A Norwegian study (Hallmo, Sundby and Mair, 1994) found that young adults aged 18–24 already heard the highest frequencies less well than children aged 8–14. In other words, the top of your hearing range has probably been falling since your teens, long before you could notice it in daily life.

This is not a new discovery. In 1876 Francis Galton built a small brass whistle with a sliding plug to find the upper limit of hearing in different people, and in his 1883 book Inquiries into Human Faculty he wrote that older people were "absolutely deaf to shrill notes which the younger persons hear acutely". He put the normal upper limit of human hearing at about 18 kHz. His whistle later became a tool for testing hearing in animals, and the ancestor of the dog whistle.

Loud sound is the other route to losing high tones. The WHO notes that noise-induced hearing loss often begins with trouble hearing some high-pitched sounds, like bells or birdsong. The two causes are hard to tell apart in an online test, which is one more reason to treat the result as a hint, not a diagnosis.

Hearing age test: can a tone tell how old your ears are?

A hearing age test can only give a rough guess. Because the top of the range falls with age on average, sites often turn your highest frequency into an "ear age". The averages are real, but the spread is wide: in the Wang study only about half of people under 30 heard 20 kHz, so a 25-year-old who stops at 18 kHz is perfectly ordinary.

The device matters as much as the ear. A cheap headphone that cannot play 18 kHz will make a teenager look 60. If your result seems far too old, repeat the test with different headphones before drawing any conclusion. If two good headphones agree, the number is a fair picture of your extended high-frequency hearing on the day.

Treat it as a curiosity and a baseline. Note your result and the headphones you used, and repeat the test in a year with the same pair. A steady, slow fall is expected; a sudden large drop is worth a professional check.

Mosquito sound: the high pitch tone adults can't hear

The mosquito tone takes its name from the Mosquito, an anti-loitering device that plays a strong, pulsating high pitch sound to keep teenagers away from shops and public spaces. According to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, it emits 75–95 dB at 16–18.5 kHz, a sound "audible to almost all young people under the age of 20 years, but barely discernible to anyone over the age of 25". The often-quoted 17.4 kHz comes from a sample on Wikipedia, so "around 17 kHz" is the honest figure.

By 2010 about 3,500 devices were in use in the United Kingdom, and they were also used in Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands and Switzerland. The Assembly noted that babies and small children often react strongly, crying or covering their ears, while their parents hear nothing. Research so far, it said, indicated no danger of hearing loss, but more tests were needed and the precautionary principle should apply.

On 25 June 2010 the Assembly adopted Recommendation 1930. It called the device a disproportionate interference with the right to private life under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, discriminatory against young people and possibly degrading, and recommended banning its use in all public places and its marketing and sale. A later version of the device also offers a lower frequency that people of all ages can hear.

Teenagers turned the idea around: the same kind of sound became a phone ringtone, sometimes called Teen Buzz, that pupils could hear in class while many teachers could not. If you want to try it, play a single tone around 17 kHz at a low volume. Not hearing it is normal for most adults and says nothing alarming about your hearing.

Can you hear this sound? Why a high tone may be silent on your device

If a tone is silent, the cause may be your speaker, not your ears. Digital audio can carry frequencies up to half its sampling rate: 22.05 kHz at 44.1 kHz, the CD standard, and 24 kHz at 48 kHz. That is already beyond human hearing, so the file or the browser is rarely the problem. The weak link is usually the hardware: phone and laptop speakers are tiny and often lose the highest treble, and some headphones roll off steeply near the top as well.

If two different pairs of headphones give very different results, believe the higher one: no device can make you hear a sound that is not there, but many can hide one that is.

Some sounds people call silent are not silent to everyone. In a test of an ultrasonic rodent repeller, younger adults often heard its lower settings, at 12–14 kHz and about 25 kHz, and several found them disturbing (van Wieringen and Glorieux, 2018). The device also gave off a faint 4–5 kHz sound. Young ears pick up more than adults expect, which is worth remembering when you play high tones near others.

Is a high frequency hearing test safe? Volume rules

A short test at a comfortable volume is well within safe limits. The WHO and ITU safe-listening standard sets a weekly allowance of 80 dB for 40 hours for adults and 75 dB for 40 hours for children. The WHO adds that 90 dB is safe for only 4 hours a week, 100 dB for 20 minutes and 110 dB for 2.5 minutes, and recommends keeping a device at no more than 60 % of its maximum volume. It also warns that even a single exposure to extremely loud sound can damage the cells of the inner ear.

The real risk in a high-frequency test is turning the volume up to chase a tone you cannot hear. If the tone has vanished for you, raising the volume does not bring it back at a safe level, and children, younger people and pets nearby may be getting far more sound than you notice. High tones can feel unpleasant or painful well before they seem loud. Start quiet, raise slowly, keep each session short, and stop if anything hurts or rings afterwards.

Your equipment deserves the same care. Small speakers and tweeters are not built for long, loud, pure high tones, and a continuous loud tone at high frequency can overheat them. Researchers have also pointed out that the public is increasingly exposed to airborne ultrasound and that the evidence base for safety guidelines is thin and old (Leighton, 2016), which is a good reason to keep high tones brief.

Online hearing test vs real hearing test: when to see a professional

An online tone test shows the top of your range; a professional hearing test checks many frequencies, ear by ear, with calibrated equipment. The two answer different questions. Missing 17–20 kHz as an adult is normal for age and may also be your headphones. A problem at ordinary frequencies, below 8 kHz, is a reason for a proper test.

The WHO lists warning signs worth acting on: difficulty hearing high-pitched sounds such as birds, doorbells, phones and alarm clocks, and ringing in the ears (tinnitus) that does not go away. The WHO also offers a free screening app, hearWHO.

If you have any of these signs, see a doctor or a hearing specialist rather than repeating online tests. Use this page for what it does well: a quick, curious look at how high you can hear, and a reminder to look after the hearing you have.