Pitch test: higher or lower?

How to take the pitch test

Put headphones on, find a quiet room and set the volume to comfortable, not loud. Tap Play. Two tones sound, 0.6 seconds each, a quarter of a second apart; tap Higher or Lower for the second one, and the next pair follows on its own. The first step is three semitones, a minor third, the first move of the Smoke on the Water riff. Each right answer cuts the step by a quarter, so seventeen in a row take you from 300 cents to the floor of 3; each miss makes it 1.6 times bigger. Every pair starts on a new random pitch between G3 and A♯4 (196 to 466 Hz), so you compare the two tones instead of remembering one.

Below 50 cents a third answer appears, "Sounds the same". It keeps your run and makes the step a quarter bigger: when you can't tell, saying so beats a coin toss. Play it again repeats the pair. After 30 or 40 rounds, watch the Step counter: it stops falling and hovers where you are right about six times in ten. That hover is your level today. Best, the number you take home, is the smallest step you got right straight after another right answer, so it sits a little below the hover. Stop and hear my best plays that step before it explains it.

What is a good pitch test score?

In lab studies with headphones, adults without musical training usually need 10 to 30 cents to say which of two tones is higher, and musicians get down to 2 to 5 (Micheyl and colleagues, 2006). Labs measure where you are right about 71 to 79 % of the time; this game's Step counter hovers where you are right about 62 %, so your hover reads a little finer than a lab figure, and Best finer still. Read the hover: 20 or 30 cents is ordinary, 10 or less is a trained ear, under 5 is close to the best anyone does in a lab. If you can't get below a semitone, 100 cents, even with headphones, read the part on tone deafness below.

Which pitch test do you need?

Pitch discrimination: higher or lower (this page)

This one measures a single thing: the smallest difference between two tones at which you can still tell the direction. It needs no note names and no voice. It is the ground the other pitch skills stand on, because you can't tune a string or correct a note you sing if you can't hear which way it is off. It doesn't tell you whether you have perfect pitch, how well you sing, or how high you can hear.

Perfect pitch test (absolute pitch)

Naming a note with no reference: a tone plays and you say “that's an E♭” straight away, the way you'd name a colour. Most pitch tests online are this kind, and it is a different skill from this one. The perfect pitch test plays twelve tones with no reference and asks you to name each.

Relative pitch test: intervals

Hearing the distance between two notes, a fifth or a minor third, whatever note it starts on. It is what you use to play a tune by ear in any key, and almost anyone can train it. Interval ear training starts with three intervals and adds more as you get them right; Major or minor trains the two chord colours you meet most.

Vocal pitch test: singing pitch accuracy

A singing pitch test, or pitch matching test, plays a note and measures how close your voice lands, in cents, through the microphone. Can I sing in tune? plays five notes and shows how far off each one landed; it counts a note within 25 cents as in tune and within 50 as close. The pitch matching game keeps a streak going. What note am I singing? shows your note live while you sing, and the pitch detector gives the note, Hz and cents of one held sound or a file. Ear and voice are separate skills: most people who sing off the note hear pitch normally, and what lags is the voice following the ear (Pfordresher and Brown, 2007). A fine score here and a rough one there is common, and the voice is the part that trains.

Tone deafness

Real tone deafness, congenital amusia, is rare: estimates run from about 1.5 % (Peretz and Vuvan, 2017) to 4 % (Kalmus and Fry, 1980). Many people with it can't tell which way a tone moved until the step is a semitone or more (Foxton and colleagues, 2004; Hyde and Peretz, 2004). The tone-deaf test checks that in twenty rounds: ten of higher or lower, then ten asking whether two short melodies were the same; this game gives the finer number.

Pitch memory: melodies

Holding a short tune in your head long enough to notice one changed note. The melody memory test starts at three notes and adds one with every right answer; the musical ear test puts pitch, intervals, melody and rhythm in one score.

High-pitched sound tests

A sweep that climbs until the sound vanishes asks something else: the highest frequency you hear, in kilohertz. Through a phone, the answer says as much about the speaker or the earbuds as about you, since many stop short of 20 kHz. The tone generator plays any frequency and a sweep; it measures nothing.

Cents and hertz: what your step means

A cent is a hundredth of a semitone, and it is the right unit for a pitch test because it means the same thing anywhere on the keyboard. Hertz don't: 2 Hz is 8 cents at A4 and 31 cents at A2, so a threshold quoted in hertz without its pitch says little. The steps this game plays, at three reference pitches (equal temperament, A4 = 440 Hz; the game itself plays between G3 and A♯4, so the A3 and A4 columns are the ones that apply here):

What changes your pitch test score

Headphones against a phone speaker, a quiet room, and being awake matter most. Thresholds widen with age, even with normal hearing for speech (Clinard, Tremblay and Krishnan, 2010), and they are finest in the middle of the range, roughly 500 to 2,000 Hz for pure tones; this game stays between 196 and 466 Hz with a full, organ-like tone. The tones last 0.6 seconds with a quarter second between them: shorter tones and longer gaps both make the step bigger.

Why “higher or lower” is harder than “same or different”

Hearing that two tones differ and hearing which way they went are separate abilities, and the second needs the bigger step. Semal and Demany (2006) found listeners whose threshold for direction was several times their threshold for noticing any change, and Foxton and colleagues (2004) found direction is where people with congenital amusia struggle most. This game asks for direction on purpose, because direction is what you use when you tune: is the string sharp or flat? When the two tones sound different but you can't say which way, tap “Sounds the same”. That border is what the game is looking for.

Perfect pitch: what people ask

Is perfect pitch actually rare?

Yes. The figure everyone quotes, about 1 in 10,000, is old and rough (it goes back to Bachem in 1955), but no count has found it common in the general population. It is far more common among musicians who started lessons before about six, and more common again among those who grew up speaking a tone language such as Mandarin. Deutsch and colleagues (2006) found it in about 60 % of Beijing conservatory students who had started at four or five, against 14 % of comparable students at Eastman in the US, and among students in a US conservatory it tracked how fluently they spoke a tone language (Deutsch and colleagues, 2009).

How do you know if you have perfect pitch?

Have someone play random notes on a piano out of your sight, with nothing played first, and name each one. Make the notes jump far apart, play a few seconds of something else between them, and don't say which were right until the end: otherwise the last note becomes a reference and relative pitch does the work. With perfect pitch the names come fast and nearly all right, with the odd semitone slip. It is usually best on the instrument you know and weaker on others: people with perfect pitch name sung notes and pure tones less accurately than piano notes (Vanzella and Schellenberg, 2010). A perfect pitch test for non-musicians, without note names, is harder to set up: the nearest check is to sing the first note of a recording you know well and compare. Levitin (1994) found ordinary listeners often land within a semitone or two of the original, so that alone isn't perfect pitch either. The perfect pitch test plays the random notes for you.

How do you sing with perfect pitch?

Singing a named note cold, with nothing played first, takes perfect pitch or long practice keeping one note in memory, and adults rarely get there: when Wong and colleagues (2020) trained adults to name notes for 12 to 40 hours, about one in seven reached the accuracy of people born to it. Singing pitch-perfect in the everyday sense, in tune with a note you are given, is trainable by almost anyone: how to sing in tune lays out the steps.

Is perfect pitch a form of autism?

No. Perfect pitch is more common among autistic people than in the general population: DePape and colleagues (2012) found it in 3 of 27 autistic teenagers they tested and in none of 27 in the comparison group. People with perfect pitch score a little higher, on average, on questionnaires of autistic traits (Brown and colleagues, 2003; Dohn and colleagues, 2012). Most people with perfect pitch are not autistic, and most autistic people don't have it.

Which famous musicians have perfect pitch? Did Michael Jackson?

Mozart is the classic documented case: Johann Andreas Schachtner, the Salzburg court trumpeter, wrote to Mozart's sister in 1792 that the boy had heard his violin was tuned half a quarter tone, an eighth of a tone, below Wolfgang's own. Past a handful of cases like his, the lists online are mostly hearsay. For Michael Jackson no test is on record that settles it either way. Singing as exactly in tune as he did takes a fine ear for relative pitch; it doesn't take perfect pitch.

Can you get better at it?

Yes, and fast at first. Micheyl and colleagues (2006) found non-musicians' thresholds about six times those of musicians at the start, and 4 to 8 hours of practice with feedback brought them down to the musicians' level. A routine that works: ten minutes a day, headphones, stop when the answers start to feel like guesses, and write down where the Step counter hovers rather than your best. Once you hover under about 25 cents, spend the time on intervals instead: telling a semitone from a whole tone does more for playing by ear than telling 6 cents from 8. The ear training exercises put the steps in order.

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