The mosquito tone: can you hear 17.4 kHz?
A single high-pitched tone, famous for being audible to a lot of teenagers and largely inaudible to their parents and teachers. Press play below and find out where you land — then read how it got that reputation.
Hearing safety first: this plays at a low fixed volume, but pure high-frequency tones can still feel piercing through headphones. Turn your device volume down before pressing play if you are at all unsure, and this is not a medical test — see the disclaimer at the bottom of this page.
Where the mosquito tone came from
The idea behind it did not start as a prank. The Mosquito is an anti-loitering device, first developed in the United Kingdom, designed to emit a high-frequency tone that is unpleasant and audible mainly to teenagers and younger people while being much less noticeable to most adults — the same age-related high-frequency decline (presbycusis) that this site’s main hearing test illustrates. It was installed outside shops, transport hubs and other spaces specifically to discourage groups of young people from gathering nearby.
Teenagers then turned the same physics around. A pitch high enough that many adults in the room genuinely could not hear it made an obvious ringtone: set your phone to a “mosquito” or “teen buzz” tone, and in theory a teacher standing at the front of a classroom would never notice it going off. The story was widely reported at the time, including by NPR, and the device itself is documented on Wikipedia.
Why the trick actually works — in general terms
There is no exact cutoff frequency where hearing switches off at a particular birthday. What actually happens, on average and with huge individual variation, is a gradual decline in sensitivity to the very highest frequencies as people get older — the pattern audiologists call presbycusis. A tone placed right at the edge of the nominally audible range, around 17–18 kHz, sits exactly where that average decline tends to have already made a difference for a lot of adults but usually not yet for a lot of teenagers.
That is a statistical tendency across a population, not a rule about any individual. Some adults retain excellent high-frequency hearing well past 40; some younger people have already lost some of it to loud headphones or genetics. And just as importantly, whether the tone is reproduced at all depends on the speaker or headphone playing it — a device that can’t output 17.4 kHz cleanly will make anyone in the room fail to hear it, regardless of their ears.
Frequently asked questions
What frequency is the mosquito tone?
There is no single official figure, but the tone popularly called the “mosquito tone” or “teen buzz” sits at roughly 17.4 kHz, deep in the range where human high-frequency hearing sensitivity has usually already started declining with age. This page lets you play exactly that frequency.
Why can teenagers hear it and adults often can’t?
The general pattern is presbycusis: age-related hearing loss that affects the highest frequencies first and tends to become noticeable as people move through their 20s, 30s and beyond, at a pace that varies a lot between individuals. A tone placed at the very top edge of the nominally audible range will therefore be heard by more young people than older people, on average — though hardware (see below) affects who hears it just as much as age does.
Where did the mosquito tone come from?
It traces back to “The Mosquito,” an anti-loitering device that emits an unpleasant high-frequency tone intended to be audible mainly to teenagers and younger people, used outside shops and other spaces to discourage groups of young people from gathering. Teenagers then adapted the same idea in reverse: a ringtone or alert tone pitched high enough that, they hoped, a teacher or parent nearby would not be able to hear their phone go off in class. See the Wikipedia entry on The Mosquito and NPR’s 2006 report on the ringtone.
If I can’t hear this tone, does that mean I have hearing loss?
Not by itself, and not reliably. Whether this specific tone reaches your ears at all depends enormously on your speakers or headphones — many laptop and phone speakers cannot cleanly reproduce anything this high regardless of who is listening. Try headphones and a slightly higher volume before drawing any conclusion, and take the full guided test on the main hearing test page for a broader picture.