Ear training
Perfect pitch trainer.
Two tones play. You say whether the second was higher or lower. Get it right and the gap narrows, from a whole tone all the way down to a couple of cents, until you find the limit of what you can actually hear.
Strictly speaking, perfect pitch (musicians call it absolute pitch) means being able to name a note with nothing to compare it to. Someone plays F sharp, you say "F sharp." It is rare, and it is mostly set in early childhood.
What this tool trains is pitch acuity, which is how small a difference between two pitches you can still hear. That is a different skill, and unlike absolute pitch, it genuinely improves with practice at any age. It is also the one that actually matters at a workbench or on stage, because it is what lets you hear that a string is slightly sharp, that one note in a chord is out, or that two guitars are not quite with each other.
A cent is one hundredth of a semitone. There are 1200 of them in an octave. Most people start out hearing around 20 to 30 cents. Trained ears get down to 5 or 10. Below about 3 cents you are at the edge of what is possible on ordinary speakers.
Current difficulty
—
Press start, then listen to both tones
How it works
Every round plays two tones. The first is a random pitch, so there is nothing to memorise, and the second is a set number of cents above or below it, chosen at random. You decide which direction it moved.
You have to get each difficulty right twice in a row to move down to the next one. That is deliberate. On a two way choice you have a fifty percent chance of guessing correctly once, so a single right answer proves nothing. Two in a row cuts that to one in four, and it keeps you from skipping ahead on luck.
Miss twice at the same difficulty and it steps back up to give you easier ground again. The score to pay attention to is finest heard, which is the smallest gap you correctly identified twice. That is the number to write down and compare against next week, or against whoever you are competing with.
Getting the most out of it
- Use headphones if you have them. Laptop and phone speakers are poor at the low end and can make small differences vanish entirely.
- Set the volume comfortably and then leave it alone. Changing volume between tones makes the louder one seem higher, which will fool you.
- Do not strain for a long session. Ears fatigue quickly and your results get worse, not better. Short and regular beats long and occasional.
- Listen for the movement, not the notes. At fine gaps you are not hearing two different pitches so much as a slight lean in one direction.
This tool watches which frequency ranges you miss in. If you are doing fine in most ranges but consistently missing one, that is worth knowing, because it can point to hearing loss in a specific band rather than poor pitch sense. Hearing loss very often shows up unevenly across frequencies, and plenty of people carry it for years without noticing, because speech still sounds normal. If the tool flags it, or if you have always found one part of the range harder, it is worth having it properly checked.
If you want to work on naming notes rather than comparing them, the note trainer covers that. To tune by ear against real references, use tuning by ear, and the chromatic tuner will show you in cents exactly how far off a real string is.