Tone deaf test how small a pitch difference can you hear?

Am I tone deaf? How to read your test result

If your threshold is under 100 cents, you can hear pitch differences smaller than a semitone, and that alone makes true tone deafness unlikely. The threshold is the smallest gap between two tones that you can still tell apart reliably, measured in cents: 100 cents is one semitone, the step between two neighbouring piano keys.

The result falls into one of three bands. These bands are this site's own rough guide, set with the research on trained listeners, ordinary listeners and people with amusia in mind; they are not a published diagnostic cut-off. The table also shows what each gap means in hertz when the first tone is 500 Hz.

A score above a semitone is not a diagnosis. Fatigue, a noisy room, lapses in attention and unfamiliarity with the task all push thresholds up, and a first run is often not your best. Retake the test on another day in a quiet room before drawing any conclusion. If you still need more than a semitone, that matches what researchers see in congenital amusia, and the proper next step is the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia, described further down.

How does this online tone deaf test work?

The test plays two pure tones, one after the other, with a base between 400 and 600 Hz, and you answer whether the second tone is higher or lower. It starts with a gap of 200 cents, a whole tone, which almost everyone hears easily. After two correct answers in a row the gap shrinks; after one wrong answer it grows. This rule is called a 2-down-1-up staircase, and it keeps the test hovering around the edge of what you can hear instead of wasting time on easy or impossible trials.

Each time the staircase turns, from shrinking to growing or back, is called a reversal. The test stops after 8 reversals and takes the geometric mean of the last 6 as your threshold. The first two reversals are dropped because they come from the descent from the easy start. A geometric mean suits cents and frequency ratios better than a simple average, because the gaps change by proportion rather than by fixed steps.

Because the base can be anywhere between 400 and 600 Hz, the question is never which tone is high in general, only how the second tone relates to the first.

• Use headphones or a decent speaker in a quiet room. Background noise and a distracting room make the test harder than it is.
• Set a comfortable, moderate volume before you start. WHO advises keeping device volume at no more than 60 % of maximum.
• Answer the direction only: is the second tone higher or lower than the first?
• If you are unsure, take your best guess. Guessing is built into the method, and the staircase corrects itself.
• Do the test twice and keep the better or the average result. Concentration varies from run to run.

What is a cent in music?

A cent is one hundredth of an equal-tempered semitone, so an octave has 1,200 cents. The unit was defined by Alexander J. Ellis in the 1880s. The interval in cents between two frequencies is 1200 × log2(f2 / f1), and one cent is a frequency ratio of about 1.00058.

Cents are useful because the ear hears pitch by ratio, not by hertz. A gap of 10 Hz is large at 100 Hz and small at 5,000 Hz, but a gap of 10 cents sounds about the same size anywhere on the keyboard. That is why this test reports your result in cents rather than in hertz, and why the base tone can change without spoiling the score.

For a sense of scale: the difference between tuning to A = 432 Hz and A = 440 Hz is 31.77 cents, a third of a semitone. The page comparing 432 Hz and 440 Hz has the history of both.

What is tone deafness (congenital amusia)?

True tone deafness is a lifelong difficulty with perceiving pitch in music, called congenital amusia, in people whose hearing and intelligence are otherwise normal. It is not the same as being unmusical, shy about singing or untrained.

The first documented case was published in 2002 by Isabelle Peretz and colleagues in the journal Neuron. A middle-aged woman, given the name Monica, had normal hearing and above-average intelligence, memory and language, yet she could not discriminate or recognise melodies and had severe difficulty detecting changes in pitch. The paper's title summed up the finding: a disorder of fine-grained pitch discrimination.

A group study the same year (Ayotte, Peretz and Hyde, in the journal Brain) tested 11 adults with the condition. They had deficits in pitch, in memory for music, in singing and in tapping in time to music. Speech, the melody of speech, voices and everyday sounds were processed normally. That contrast is the core of amusia: the problem is specific to the fine pitch detail that music depends on.

How common is tone deafness?

About 1.5 % of people have congenital amusia, according to the largest study so far. Isabelle Peretz and Dominique Vuvan (European Journal of Human Genetics, 2017) tested about 20,000 participants who had not signed up because they suspected a problem, using three objective online tests and a questionnaire.

The older figure of 4 %, still repeated in many articles, came from a single test from 1980. The 2017 study found slightly more women than men affected and found that 46 % of first-degree relatives of amusic people were similarly affected, which points to a strong family component. Musical training did not reduce the prevalence.

Many more people than 1.5 % describe themselves as tone deaf. Most of them are thinking of their singing, and that is a separate matter.

Can you sing out of tune without being tone deaf?

Yes, and it is far more common than true tone deafness. In two experiments published in 2007, Peter Pfordresher and Steven Brown found that 10–15 % of participants imitated pitch at least a semitone off. These poor-pitch singers did not differ from good singers in pitch discrimination: they heard the notes as well as anyone.

The researchers concluded that the problem lies in mapping pitch onto the voice, not in hearing it. A person can know perfectly well that a note is wrong and still be unable to make their voice land on the right one, much as someone can recognise a face without being able to draw it.

This is why a pitch test like this one answers a narrower question than people expect. A good score means your ear is fine. If you still sing off key, your hearing is not the obstacle, and the work lies in matching your voice to what you already hear.

Do tone deaf people have rhythm? Pitch, timing and the semitone

Often they do: in amusia, pitch and timing can come apart. Krista Hyde and Isabelle Peretz (Psychological Science, 2004) found that all the amusic participants they tested were impaired at detecting a pitch change in a five-tone sequence and did not improve with practice, but they detected changes in timing normally. The title of the paper puts it neatly: brains that are out of tune but in time.

The semitone is the key boundary. Reviewing the behavioural and brain-response evidence, Moreau, Jolicœur and Peretz (Brain and Cognition, 2013) report that amusic people show no conscious detection of pitch differences smaller than a semitone.

The same review describes something surprising: the brains of amusic people can register pitch changes as small as a quarter-tone without any awareness of them. Foxton and colleagues (Brain, 2004) found that 10 amusic adults had raised thresholds both for fine pitch changes and for telling the direction of a pitch change, which is exactly what the higher-or-lower question in this test asks.

How small a pitch difference can people hear? Musicians vs non-musicians

Below 500 Hz most people can just notice a difference of about 3 Hz between two sine tones, and above 1,000 Hz about 0.6 %, roughly 10 cents. These are approximate textbook figures and depend on how they are measured. For the best-trained listeners near 1,000 Hz the threshold is well below 1 Hz, under 0.1 %. At this test's 500 Hz, a 3 Hz gap works out at about 10 cents.

Training makes a large difference. Christophe Micheyl and colleagues (Hearing Research, 2006) compared 30 classical musicians with 30 non-musicians. At first the non-musicians' thresholds were more than six times larger. After 2 hours of practice they were still about four times larger, and the non-musicians needed 4–8 hours of training to match the musicians.

Lab thresholds come from many careful trials under controlled conditions, so compare your own number with them loosely. If you are not a musician and score between 25 and 100 cents, you are in good company.

Tone deaf test online vs a real amusia test (MBEA)

This page is a screening game that measures one thing, your pitch discrimination threshold; it is not the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA). The MBEA is the standard research test for amusia, published by Peretz, Champod and Hyde in 2003. It gives reliable results on retest, its scores are normally distributed, and they correlate with Gordon's Musical Aptitude Profile.

The difference matters. Amusia involves memory for melodies, recognising tunes and keeping time as well as hearing pitch, and a diagnosis rests on a set of tests under controlled conditions. A single threshold from a browser, with whatever headphones you have, can tell you that your pitch hearing is clearly fine, or that it might be worth a closer look. It cannot tell you that you have a disorder.

If your result stays above a semitone after several careful attempts, and you also find it hard to recognise familiar songs without the words, that combination is what the MBEA is designed to examine, and a specialist in hearing or music cognition is the right person to ask.

Can you train your ear if you are tone deaf?

Ordinary pitch hearing improves quickly with practice; true amusia, in the research so far, does not. The Micheyl study showed non-musicians closing a sixfold gap in 4–8 hours of lab training. By contrast, the amusic participants in the Hyde and Peretz study did not improve at detecting pitch changes with practice, and the 2017 prevalence study found that musical training did not reduce the rate of amusia.

For the great majority of people who call themselves tone deaf, then, the ear is trainable and the voice is often the real issue. A practical routine that uses only free tools looks like this:

• Repeat this test a few times a week and note your threshold. Watching the number fall is motivating, and it shows whether practice is working for you.
• Use the tone generator to play a steady note in a comfortable range, then hum or sing it and listen to whether your voice sits on the tone, above it or below it.
• Record yourself singing a short phrase against a reference note and listen back. Since poor-pitch singers usually hear pitch normally, the recording lets your ear judge your voice.
• Learn the note names with the note frequency chart, so that you can hear and name the steps of a scale, one semitone at a time.
• Keep sessions short and the volume moderate. Concentration fades long before the ear does.

None of these exercises has been tested in a study as a cure for poor-pitch singing, and they are offered as practice, not treatment. They rest on the research finding that hearing and singing are separate skills, and that ordinary pitch hearing responds to training.

Tone deafness vs perfect pitch: the two ends of pitch hearing

Tone deafness and perfect pitch are both about pitch, but they measure different abilities. This test asks whether you can tell two tones apart; perfect pitch, or absolute pitch, is the ability to name a single note with no reference at all.

The two are also less rare at each end than legend says. True tone deafness affects about 1.5 %, not the 4 % often quoted. Perfect pitch is said to occur in 1 in 10,000 people, but that figure is an old estimate, and a 2019 review by Jane Carden and Tony Cline found that studies indicate at least 4 % among music students.

Between the two lies almost everyone: people who hear pitch differences well enough to follow any melody and who could hear smaller ones with practice. If you want to try the other end, the perfect pitch test on this site plays 12 notes and asks you to name each one.