Hearing Range Test

How high can you hear? This test plays sixteen tones, from 125 Hz up to 20 kHz. Play each one and say whether you can hear it. The run stops at the first one you can't.

Treat the result as a rough guide. It depends on your speakers or headphones and the room you're in as much as on your ears, so it can't tell you anything about your hearing health. If you're ever worried about your hearing, consult a specialist.

Set your volume before you start, and leave it there. If you turn it up as the tones get higher, you'll find where your speakers give out, not where your hearing does. And high tones can be much louder than they sound.

What your result means

It means you heard a tone at that pitch, through those speakers, in that room, at that volume. That's useful to know, and it's also all it tells you. A proper hearing test works differently: it finds the quietest sound you can hear at each pitch, using calibrated equipment in a quiet booth, and draws a curve. This test gives you one number, from equipment nobody has measured.

The most common reason for a low result here is the equipment. Laptop speakers, phone earpieces and cheap earbuds often drop off sharply above 12-15 kHz, so the tone simply isn't coming out. If your result surprises you, try again with a different pair of headphones before reading anything into it.

How hearing changes with age

The textbook range for human hearing is about 20 Hz to 20 kHz, but that top figure is for young, healthy ears, and hardly anyone keeps it. The top end drops gradually with age for everyone. It's called presbycusis, and it's completely normal. As a rough guide, many people under 20 can hear 17-18 kHz or higher, 15-16 kHz is common in your thirties, 12-14 kHz in your forties and fifties, and lower after that. These are wide, overlapping ranges, not cut-offs, and landing outside them doesn't make you unusual.

For what that decline looks like decade by decade in published hearing data, and why 20 kHz was only ever a young person's ceiling, see Hearing Range by Age.

The 17.4 kHz step has a name: the mosquito tone. It was used in devices meant to be heard by teenagers but not adults, and later as a ringtone for the opposite reason. If you can hear it, you're in a minority of adults. If you can't, that's perfectly ordinary.

Losing the very top of your range matters much less day to day than you might think. Speech sits mostly between 250 Hz and 6 kHz, and the notes in music almost entirely below 5 kHz. Above 15 kHz is the air and shimmer: cymbals, sparkle, breath. Losing it changes the texture of sound, not whether you can understand it.

Use headphones if you can

Rooms play tricks with high tones. Sound from a speaker reaches you directly and also bounces off the desk, walls and screen, and at some pitches those reflections cancel each other out. That's a real gap in the sound, and it has nothing to do with your ears. Move your head ten centimetres and the answer changes. Headphones take the room out of the picture, which is why real hearing tests always use them.

Take it one tone at a time. If a tone seems to disappear, turn your head slightly before deciding you can't hear it, and be honest about the difference between hearing a tone and expecting to. Near the top of the range, it's very tempting to say yes to silence.

Where equipment and ears give out together

Above about 15 kHz, three things are fading at once: the speaker's ability to play the tone, the room's ability to carry it, and your ears' ability to hear it. A browser can't tell which one ended your run, and any page that says it can is guessing. That's why the result here gives a range and stops there. The honest answer is "you heard up to here, on this equipment", and anything more would be made up.

If you want a number that means something medically, a specialist can give you one in about twenty minutes. If you want to know whether your headphones work, whether one ear seems different from the other, or roughly where your top end is, this is just right for that.

Not sure where the problem is? Run the full sound check. It's six quick questions, and at the end it tells you which tool to use next.