Tone deaf test: am I tone deaf?

How to take the tone deaf test

The test runs in the browser on a phone or laptop: free, no app to install, no microphone. Put on headphones, find a quiet room and set the volume so the first tone is comfortable; on an iPhone, turn the silent switch off or the tones stay mute. Tap Start. In part one, answer which way the second tone went. When you can't tell, tap "Sounds the same" instead of guessing: a lucky guess makes the next step smaller than your ear really is, and the result ends up wrong in your favour. "Play it again" replays a round as often as you like. In part two, say whether the second tune was the same as the first. At the end the page plays the smallest step you heard, then shows the number. A low score on a phone speaker in a noisy room says little; take it again with headphones on another day before you believe it.

How the two parts find your step

Part one is a staircase. The two tones start two semitones apart, the distance of a whole step on the piano. After a right answer the step shrinks; after a wrong one, or "Sounds the same", it widens. It settles where you are right about two times in three, and that step, in cents, is your result: a hundred cents make a semitone, so 25 cents is a quarter of the distance between two piano keys. In part one the first tone of each pair is a random pitch between G3 and A♯4 (196 to 466 Hz), not tied to the piano keys, and the second sits your step above or below it; below 100 cents that step is smaller than any two neighbouring keys. Each tone is built with a few soft overtones, like an organ stop, so a phone speaker can play it. Part two's tunes start on a note from A3 to E4. Part two plays a five-note tune in a major key twice. In the first five tunes a moved note changes the tune's direction; in the last five it keeps the shape and changes only the size of a step, which is the harder kind. The verdict takes the weaker of the two parts. The tones are made in your browser, not downloaded, and your answers stay on your phone; only the optional "Was that right?" note sends the result, never any sound.

What your tone deaf test score means

What is a normal or average score?

With headphones in a quiet room most people settle between 10 and 50 cents and catch seven or more of the ten tunes: a normal ear, the one music needs. 10 cents or less with nine tunes or more is a trained ear, the level people who tune instruments work at. Between 50 and 100 cents, or six tunes, is unclear today. Above a semitone, or five tunes or fewer, is close to what guessing gets, and the page says so. On a phone speaker everybody lands higher, so compare like with like.

I scored low. Am I tone deaf?

Probably not. Noise, a small speaker, a tired evening or a lapse of attention push the number up as easily as your ear can. Take it again with headphones, rested, in a quiet room. If it stays above a semitone twice and you miss most of the moved notes, your result looks like what researchers see in amusia, and a specialist can test that properly: research groups use the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia (Peretz, Champod and Hyde, 2003), six short listening tests for scale, contour, intervals, rhythm, metre and memory. No quiz on a phone can diagnose it, this one included.

What does tone deaf mean?

Tone deaf, used properly, means the brain doesn't process pitch well: two notes a semitone apart sound alike, and a wrong note in a familiar tune slips by. The research name is amusia (sometimes called pitch deafness). Most people who have it were born with it (congenital amusia); a few get it after a brain injury such as a stroke (acquired amusia). The ears themselves usually work normally. Speech mostly sounds fine too, because the pitch moves in speech are large, though careful studies find some amusic people have trouble telling a question from a statement by its melody alone (Patel and colleagues, 2008).

It runs in families. In Drayna and colleagues' twin study (Science, 2001), most of the difference between people on a wrong-note test was inherited, and Peretz, Cummings and Dubé (2007) found amusia in 39 percent of the close relatives of amusic people, against 3 percent in other families. Rhythm is often spared: many amusic people clap in time and enjoy music, while others describe a melody as noise.

Signs of being tone deaf

• You can't tell whether a note went up or down, even when the step is two or three piano keys.
• A wrong note in "Happy Birthday" goes unnoticed while everyone else winces.
• Without the words, two well-known tunes are hard to tell apart.
• Out-of-tune singing, yours or anyone's, doesn't sound wrong to you.

What is not a sign: singing off key while hearing that it's off, losing a harmony part, not being able to name notes, going flat on high notes. Those are the voice and training, not the ear. If you notice that you sing out of tune, the noticing is your ear doing its job.

How rare is it to be tone deaf?

Rare, and rarer than people think. The first large estimate, from the Distorted Tunes Test in Britain (Kalmus and Fry, 1980), was about 4 percent. A later online study of more than 20,000 people put congenital amusia at about 1.5 percent (Peretz and Vuvan, 2017). Against that, about one in six people say they are tone deaf: 17 percent of the university students Cuddy and colleagues asked in 2005, most of whom then scored in the normal range on a melody test. The NIDCD (part of the NIH) puts problems with pitch perception at 2 to 5 percent of Americans; the stricter the test and the cut-off, the lower the figure. If you are worried you are tone deaf, the odds are strongly that you aren't.

Tone deaf, or just singing out of tune? Ear against voice

Hearing pitch and singing it are two different skills. The ear has to hear the note; the voice has to find it, and that takes a coordination nobody is born with. Peter Pfordresher and Steven Brown's study "Poor-pitch singing in the absence of tone deafness" (2007) found that 10 to 15 percent of the adults in each of their two experiments sang at least a semitone off the note, and they heard pitch differences as well as the good singers did. That is the usual story behind "I can't sing". If this test says your ear is normal and your singing still sounds off, the next question is the voice, and that takes a tone deaf singing test, one that listens to you sing: Can I sing in tune? plays five notes and measures, in cents, how close you sing each one back.

Does being tone deaf mean you can't sing? Not quite that either. In Loui and colleagues' study (Current Biology, 2008), tone-deaf people sang the direction of small pitch changes they could not say they had heard: the voice got some of it right while the ear reported nothing. Most amusic people do sing out of tune (Ayotte, Peretz and Hyde, 2002), and practice moves them less than it moves everyone else.

How to fix being tone deaf

If your ear passed, there is nothing to fix in it; what you train is pitch matching. The steps a voice teacher uses:

1. Start low and easy, near your speaking voice. Most adults who think they can't sing start songs above where their voice sits; the vocal range test shows where yours is.
2. Hum before you sing. A hum on "mm" is easier to place than an open vowel.
3. Slide into the note. Play one note, start a little below it and glide up until the two sound like one, with no wobble between them. That locked feeling is a unison.
4. Hear yourself. Take one side of the headphones off, or cup a hand behind one ear, so your own voice is as loud as the reference.
5. Get feedback you can see. What note am I singing? reads your note live, so you know whether you are above or below.
6. Ten minutes a day beats an hour on Sunday. A round of the pitch matching game is exactly this drill.

Your ear trains too, whatever some test sites say. Micheyl and colleagues (Hearing Research, 2006) found that classical musicians heard pitch steps about six times smaller than non-musicians did, and with four to eight hours of practice the non-musicians reached the musicians' level. A score in cents that drops when you take the test again a month later is the practice showing. The ear training exercises are where to start. To keep practising part one as a game, Higher or lower runs it without end, down to 3 cents.

For real amusia, practice helps less. Small studies (for example Liu and colleagues, 2017) report that the step at which amusic listeners hear up or down can shrink with training, but none report that it goes away. Rhythm stays open to everyone, and so do instruments whose notes are fixed before you play, such as piano, keyboards and drums. The whole route for the voice is on How to sing in tune.

Harvard, Yale and NIH: the other tone deaf tests online

As of October 2026, these are the tests people search for by name. They measure different things, which is why two of them can disagree about the same person.

A pitch-step test like part one asks how fine your ear is; a tune test like part two or the Distorted Tunes Test asks whether you hear a melody change. Amusia shows on both. A low score on one and a normal score on the other usually points to the room, the speaker, or tunes you didn't grow up with.

Which is the best tone deaf test? The one that answers your question. For a plain yes or no, take one that tells you what guessing would score: this one or ToneDeafTest.com. For a number to compare next month, take one that gives your smallest step in cents: this one. Sage's optional adaptive round also hunts for the smallest step you hear, folded into its percentage. To give your answers to science, take The Music Lab's. Any of them is worth more taken twice, with headphones, on two different days.

A tone deaf test in Hz: how big a cent is

Cents are a ratio, so the same step is more hertz on a higher note. Equal temperament, computed from A4 = 440 Hz:

So a normal ear at 25 cents tells apart two tones about 3 Hz apart around A3. The amusic listeners in Hyde and Peretz's study (2004) had trouble with changes smaller than about two semitones, everything below the top row. To hear any of these frequencies as a held tone, the tone generator plays any frequency from 20 Hz up.

Is perfect pitch the opposite of tone deaf?

No, though several test sites say so. Perfect (absolute) pitch is naming a note with no reference: a memory for pitch names. The opposite of tone deaf is a fine ear for how notes relate to each other, called relative pitch, and that is what music runs on. Most good musicians don't have perfect pitch and don't need it. It is usually put at about 1 in 10,000 people in Europe and North America (Takeuchi and Hulse's review, 1993), and it is far more common among musicians who started before about age six and among speakers of tone languages such as Mandarin (Deutsch and colleagues, 2006). It is also reported more often in autistic people (Heaton, Hermelin and Pring, 1998, and later studies), though most people with perfect pitch are not autistic.

Is there a perfect pitch test for non-musicians? The usual kind asks you to name notes, so it needs the names; the perfect pitch test plays twelve tones and labels the keys you answer on. Non-musicians show a quieter pitch memory instead: in Levitin's study (1994), people asked to sing a favourite pop song from memory often started within a semitone or two of the record's key. Does Lady Gaga have perfect pitch? It is said of her and of many famous singers; it comes from interviews and fan pages, and we know of no published test of hers.

How do you know if you're musically gifted?

No single number says it. Aptitude tests such as Edwin Gordon's Advanced Measures of Music Audiation (1989) play two short phrases and ask whether they were the same, or different in their notes or in their rhythm, much like part two here. The everyday signs: you hear when a singer goes flat, a tune stays with you after one hearing, you keep time without counting. Each of them also grows with practice, so a modest score says where you start, not where you stop. The musical ear test scores pitch, intervals, melody memory and rhythm part by part.

Can children take a tone deaf test?

They can play it, but a child's result says less: pitch hearing keeps developing through childhood, which is why the NIDCD test is for 16 and older. For children from five, Higher or lower asks the same question as a game, with no points.

"Tone deaf" as an insult

Off the music page, "tone deaf" means out of touch with how other people feel: a tone-deaf ad, a tone-deaf joke at a funeral. Said about someone's singing, it is usually just wrong, since so few people are. Said about a remark, it is criticism, and people hear it that way. "Sings off key" or "hasn't practised singing" says what is meant.

Then make something of it

If your ear came out normal, the question "am I tone deaf?" is answered and the one left is your voice: Can I sing in tune? plays five notes for you to sing back, and the pitch matching game practises it. Or hum a whole line into Brumm and it becomes an instrument inside a club track, in tune or not. No account, no upload.

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