Hearing test — how high can you hear?
A guided tone ladder steps upward from 8 kHz to 20 kHz. Press play, listen honestly, and tell it whether you can still hear each tone. The highest one you confirm gets mapped to a rough age band below — for fun, not for diagnosis.
This is not a medical or audiometric test. What you hear here depends heavily on your speakers or headphones, your volume, background noise, and your device's own frequency response — many laptop and phone speakers cannot reproduce the highest tones at all, hearing or no hearing. A real hearing check needs a professional audiologist with calibrated equipment. Hearing safety: start at a low volume, especially with headphones — pure tones can sound sharper and louder than music at the same setting.
Guided test
Headphones recommended, quiet room, low volume to start.
Step 1 of 10
8 kHzYour result
Highest frequency you confirmed hearing: —
Rough age-band comparison: —
Unscientific and hardware-dependent — see the disclaimer above and the “Use cases & limitations” section below before reading anything into this.
Free-play tone generator
Pick any frequency from 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz and play it directly — useful for comparing headphones, sweeping for a specific pitch, or trying the mosquito tone.
How the test works
The guided test plays one pure sine tone at a time, starting at 8 kHz and stepping upward through 10, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 and finally 20 kHz. At each step you answer honestly: can you still hear it, or not? As soon as you say no, the test stops and reports the highest step you confirmed. If you hear all the way to 20 kHz, that is the result — the top of the range this tool plays and close to the top of the nominal human hearing range.
Each tone is a single frequency generated fresh by an oscillator, ramped smoothly up to volume and back down to silence over a few dozen milliseconds so nothing here clicks or pops in your ears or your speakers. Nothing is pre-recorded; every tone is synthesised locally the instant you press play.
Underneath the guided test, a free-play mode lets you type or drag to any frequency between 20 Hz and 20,000 Hz and play it on demand — handy for sweeping around your own result, comparing two pairs of headphones, or just checking what a specific pitch like 440 Hz (concert A) or 17,400 Hz (the “mosquito tone”) actually sounds like.
High-frequency hearing and age (presbycusis), in general terms
Presbycusis is the clinical term for age-related hearing loss: a gradual, usually symmetrical decline in hearing that is the most common cause of hearing loss worldwide. Its defining pattern is that it affects the highest frequencies first, well before it reaches the range that most speech sounds occupy — which is exactly why a high-frequency tone ladder like this one is a popular (if very rough) way to illustrate the general trend, even though it cannot measure any individual's hearing precisely.
The rate and severity of presbycusis vary enormously between people. Genetics, a lifetime of noise exposure (loud workplaces, concerts, headphones at high volume), certain medications, and general cardiovascular health all play a role, so two people of the same age can have very different top-end hearing. That variability is precisely why the age bands this tool shows are labelled as rough estimates, not a chart you should expect your own result to match closely.
For background on presbycusis from a primary medical source, see the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
What this test can and can’t tell you
What it can reasonably do
- Give you a rough, repeatable comparison point. Run it again on the same device, same headphones and same volume a month from now, and a meaningfully different result is worth noticing — even though neither result is a clinical measurement.
- Compare two pairs of headphones or speakers. If switching hardware changes what you can hear, that tells you something concrete about the hardware.
- Demonstrate presbycusis’s general shape to a classroom or a curious household — as an illustration of “high frequencies go first,” not as a measurement of anyone in the room.
What it genuinely cannot do
- Diagnose hearing loss of any kind. Only a calibrated audiometric test administered by a professional can do that.
- Separate your ears from your equipment. A tone that never reaches your eardrum because a speaker can’t reproduce it looks identical, from this tool’s point of view, to a tone your ears genuinely can’t detect.
- Control for volume calibration. Every device, every pair of headphones and every system volume setting delivers a different actual sound pressure level for the same slider position, so results are not comparable between different people's setups.
- Say anything about mid- or low-frequency hearing, tinnitus, one-sided hearing loss, or how well you understand speech in noise — all real, common concerns this test is not built to touch.
Headphones vs. speakers — and why it changes your result
If you want the most consistent result this tool can give, use wired headphones or earphones in a quiet room, at a low-to-moderate volume. A few reasons the same ears can get very different results on different hardware:
- Driver size. Small speaker drivers — the kind built into most laptops and phones — are physically less efficient at reproducing very high frequencies than a full-size headphone driver placed right at your ear canal.
- Placement and enclosure. Built-in laptop speakers are often angled away from your ears and coloured by the laptop’s own casing, which can roll off or reflect high frequencies unpredictably.
- Wireless compression. Some Bluetooth audio codecs prioritise bandwidth for the frequencies speech and music rely on most, and may not faithfully reproduce a pure tone at the very top of the range. A wired connection avoids this variable entirely.
- System and app volume, stacked. The slider in this tool, your operating system's volume, and your headphones' own physical volume knob (if they have one) all multiply together — a tone can be inaudible simply because one of the three is turned down.
The “mosquito tone” phenomenon
Around 17.4 kHz sits a tone that became genuinely famous: audible to many teenagers and young adults, but inaudible to most people whose high-frequency hearing has already started its ordinary age-related decline. It was popularised first as an anti-loitering device and later as a ringtone teenagers used specifically because the adults around them often couldn’t hear it. The full history, and a one-click button to try the tone for yourself, live on the dedicated mosquito tone page.
Frequently asked questions
Is this a real hearing test?
No. This is not a medical or audiometric test and cannot diagnose hearing loss. A real hearing test is performed by an audiologist with calibrated equipment in a controlled sound environment. This tool measures what reaches your ears through whatever speakers or headphones you happen to have plugged in right now, at whatever volume you happen to have set — that is a test of your whole listening chain, not your ears in isolation. If you have a genuine concern about your hearing, see a professional audiologist.
Why can’t I hear the higher tones even though my hearing feels fine?
Very likely your hardware, not your ears. Many laptop and phone speakers roll off well before 20 kHz because small drivers struggle to reproduce very high frequencies efficiently, and some audio hardware applies its own filtering near the top of the range. If a tone plays silently for you at a low frequency too, or if switching to headphones changes your result significantly, that confirms the limit is coming from the hardware or the room, not your hearing.
Does it matter if I use headphones or speakers?
Yes, a great deal. Wired headphones or earphones placed directly at the ear canal are far more likely to reproduce a clean tone above 10 kHz than a laptop’s built-in speakers, which are small, often angled away from your ears, and shaped by the laptop’s own housing. Bluetooth headphones add another variable: some audio codecs used over Bluetooth compress or roll off the very top of the audible range. For a more consistent result, use wired headphones and a quiet room.
What is presbycusis?
Presbycusis is the clinical name for age-related hearing loss — a gradual, typically symmetrical decline in hearing that tends to affect the highest frequencies first, before it affects the frequencies speech relies on most. It is extremely common and its rate varies enormously between individuals depending on genetics, noise exposure history and general health, which is exactly why this page’s age bands are described as rough estimates and nothing more.
What is the “mosquito tone”?
A pure tone around 17.4 kHz that became known for being audible to many teenagers and younger adults while being inaudible to most people past their mid-30s to 40s, due to the ordinary high-frequency hearing decline that presbycusis describes. It was popularised by an anti-loitering device and then repurposed by teenagers as a ringtone their teachers and parents allegedly couldn’t hear. The full story, and a button to try the tone yourself, is on the dedicated mosquito tone page.
Why does the volume slider matter so much here?
Pure sine tones at a given volume setting often sound louder and sharper than music or speech at the same setting, because all of the energy sits at one frequency instead of being spread across many. Start at a low volume, especially with headphones, and only raise it if a tone is genuinely too quiet to judge. The slider is deliberately capped well under maximum gain for this reason.
Can background noise affect my result?
Yes. Fans, air conditioning, traffic and even the faint hiss of some headphone amplifiers can mask a quiet high-frequency tone that you would otherwise hear. Test somewhere quiet and, if the result surprises you, try again later in a different room before drawing any conclusion from it.
Do you store or upload anything from this test?
No. Every tone is generated locally in your browser using the Web Audio API, and your answers exist only in the page’s memory for the length of your visit. Nothing about which tones you could or couldn’t hear is ever sent anywhere, saved, or associated with you in any way.
My result seems much lower than I expected for my age — should I worry?
Not automatically. Try a different pair of headphones, a quieter room, and a slightly higher (but still comfortable) volume before drawing any conclusion — hardware and environment explain most surprising results on a browser-based tone test. If a genuinely low result persists across different setups and you have concerns about your hearing day-to-day, that is worth raising with a professional audiologist, who can measure it properly rather than estimate it.