Extended high frequency · a toy, not a test
How High
Can You Hear?
A pure tone starts at 8,000 Hz and climbs. Tap the moment it disappears. Then a short second round checks whether you were really hearing it, because the top of your hearing is the first thing to go and the last thing you notice going.
Before you start
Skip this one if you have tinnitus, hyperacusis or any sensitivity to sound. And if you are wearing earbuds with the volume already high, turn it down before you go on.
- Wired headphones give the only answer worth having. Bluetooth codecs sometimes throw away the top of the range before it reaches your ear.
- Find somewhere quiet. Room noise masks faint high tones badly.
- The level is capped in software and nothing on this page can raise it. Set your device volume in the next step and then leave it alone.
This one needs the Web Audio API, and this browser is not offering it. Nothing to hear, unfortunately — the rest of the site does not need it.
Step 1 · Set the level
This is 1,000 Hz, the frequency your ear handles best. Adjust your device volume until it is clearly there but quiet — the loudness of someone talking in the next room. Not loud. You will be listening for faint things in a moment.
Every tone that follows plays at exactly this level. That is what makes the result mean anything.
Step 2 · Check the equipment
This tone is 10,000 Hz. Nearly all working speakers can produce it, and most ears can detect it. It is here to catch a silent speaker before it gets mistaken for a silent ear.
Step 3 · The climb
The tone begins at 8,000 Hz and rises for about twenty-four seconds. The frequency is hidden while it runs, so that you answer with your ears instead of with your expectations.
Ready
Step 4 · Confirm it
Six short tones near your answer, in random order. Two of them are silent. Answer honestly — the silent ones are the only way to tell a real cutoff from a hopeful one.
Trial 1 of 6
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Bands from extended high-frequency audiometry in 162 healthy adults aged 21 to 70, all with normal ordinary hearing. A population trend, not a measurement of you.
This is not an audiogram and cannot be used as one. If anything about your hearing worries you, see an audiologist.
About This Toy
How High Can You Hear? finds the ceiling of your hearing and then tries to talk you out of trusting it. A sine tone climbs from 8,000 Hz upward at a fixed level; you tap when it goes; a handful of catch trials then check whether you were hearing tones or hearing expectation. The number that comes out is an interesting number. It is not a diagnosis, and the page says so more than once on purpose.
The reason to start at 8 kHz is that this is where the interesting damage hides. Standard audiometry stops there, and high-frequency loss usually only shows up on a standard test around age fifty — but extend the measurement above 8 kHz and it becomes obvious decades earlier. In one study, adults aged forty-five to fifty-five who all had textbook-normal hearing up to 8 kHz nevertheless had measurably worse thresholds than twenty-five to thirty-five year olds between 8 and 16 kHz. More striking still: whether or not those people had noticed anything made no difference to their thresholds.
That is the real subject here. Hearing does not fail from the middle outward, where you would notice. It fails from the top down, in a region you almost never use, and it starts long before anyone thinks about it. The tone you cannot hear today was audible to you at fifteen, and no moment ever announced the change.
How To Use It
- Put on wired headphones and find a quiet room. Built-in laptop speakers will give you a nonsense answer.
- Set your device volume on the 1,000 Hz reference so it is comfortably quiet, then do not touch the volume again.
- Pass the 10 kHz equipment check. If you hear nothing there, the hardware is probably the ceiling, not you.
- Tap the moment the climbing tone disappears. Do not wait to be certain — certainty arrives late and inflates the number.
- Do the six catch trials honestly. Claiming the silent ones is how these tests get their reputation.
Why This Exists
Every version of this test on the internet has the same two problems, and both are solvable. The first is that it never checks your equipment, so a phone speaker with nothing above 15 kHz gets reported back to a twenty-year-old as hearing loss. The second is that there is no way to be wrong: the tone either exists or it doesn't, you say what you like, and the page congratulates you. Adding two silent trials fixes that completely and costs nothing.
The other thing worth building in is honesty about the level. A real audiogram finds the quietest level at which you can detect each frequency, which is a threshold. This finds the highest frequency you can detect at one fixed level, which is a different and much cruder quantity, and it means the volume knob is a cheat code. So the level is capped in software, set once against a 1,000 Hz reference, and never adjusted again. That constraint is the whole reason the number is worth anything.
What the number is worth is still modest. Age is the loudest signal in high-frequency hearing but far from the only one: noise exposure, genetics, medication, illness and a bad afternoon all move it. A cutoff that reads older than you does not mean anything is wrong, and a cutoff that reads young does not mean nothing is. It means a tone vanished at a particular pitch on a particular pair of headphones on a particular day.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is How High Can You Hear?
A pure tone starts at 8,000 Hz and climbs steadily. You tap the moment it disappears, and that point is your rough high-frequency cutoff. A short second round then replays a few tones around your answer, including two silent trials, to check whether you were really hearing them or filling in the gap yourself.
Is this a real hearing test?
No, and it is not close. Proper audiometry happens in a sound-treated room with calibrated headphones and measures the quietest level in decibels at which you detect each frequency, one frequency at a time. This runs through unknown speakers in an unknown room at one fixed level. Treat it as a curiosity. If you have any concern about your hearing, see an audiologist rather than a web page.
Why does the tone seem to get quieter as it rises?
Because your ear is far less sensitive up there, and the tone is deliberately held at one unchanging level the whole way. It is not fading out; you are losing it. That is also why turning the volume up mid-sweep ruins the result rather than improving it, since it moves the vanishing point without telling you anything about your ears.
Could my speakers be the limit rather than my ears?
Very possibly, which is why there is an equipment check before the sweep. Laptop and phone speakers frequently produce almost nothing above about 15 kHz, so a low cutoff on built-in speakers usually says more about the hardware than about you. Wired headphones give the most trustworthy answer, and Bluetooth is worth avoiding because some codecs discard the top of the range before it reaches you.
Is it safe to listen to?
The tones are short, quiet and capped in software at a low fixed level that no control on the page can raise. The one real risk is you overriding that with the device volume, so the calibration step asks you to set a comfortable level using a 1,000 Hz reference and then leave it alone. If you have tinnitus, hyperacusis or any sound sensitivity, skip this one entirely.
What counts as a normal cutoff for my age?
In a study of 162 healthy adults with normal ordinary hearing, every participant under 30 responded at 16 kHz and about 52 per cent of them responded at 20 kHz. Thresholds above 8 kHz started slipping in the 31 to 40 group. Nobody aged 51 to 60 responded at 20 kHz, and nobody aged 61 to 70 responded even at 18 kHz. The bands this page reports are read off that pattern, so they describe a population trend rather than your ears.
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