Hearing range sweep.
Human hearing is usually described as running from about 20 Hz to 20 kHz, and the top of that range is the part that quietly narrows with age and noise exposure. This page plays any frequency in that span so you can hear where your own top end sits — and tells you plainly why the number you get is a curiosity rather than a measurement.
Read this before you use it: this is not a hearing test, and it cannot be one.
A real audiogram is produced with calibrated equipment delivering known sound-pressure levels in a quiet, controlled room, and read by someone trained to interpret it. What comes out of this page passes through your volume setting, your device’s amplifier, your headphones’ own frequency response and whatever noise is in the room — none of it measured, all of it different on every device. Most consumer headphones roll off sharply near the top of this range, so a tone you cannot hear here may simply be a tone your headphones are not producing.
Use it as a listening experiment. If you have ringing, muffled hearing, pain, sudden change in one ear, or any concern at all, see an audiologist or your doctor — a real test takes minutes and this page is no substitute for one.
Nothing you do here is stored or sent anywhere. The marks you make live in the page until you close the tab.
Protect your ears. Raise the volume from silence rather than lowering it from loud — a high sine tone can be painfully loud before you register it as loud. Stop if anything hurts or rings afterwards. This tool caps sessions at 20 minutes like the rest of the free tools, but you should need far less than that.
Why this is not a hearing test.
Because none of the chain between the code and your ear is calibrated, and a hearing test is entirely a question of calibration. The tone is exact; everything after it is not.
Clinical audiometry measures the quietest level at which you detect a tone at each frequency, in decibels of hearing level, using equipment whose output is verified against a known standard, in a room quiet enough that the threshold is yours rather than the room’s. Four things stand between this page and that:
- Your headphones have their own frequency response. Most consumer headphones and nearly all laptop speakers roll off steeply above 15 kHz. A tone you cannot hear may be a tone that was never produced.
- Your volume is unknown. There is no way for a web page to know how many decibels arrive at your eardrum. Two people at “half volume” are not doing the same experiment.
- Your room is not quiet. Ambient noise masks quiet tones, and low frequencies are masked worst.
- Detection is not the same as threshold. Audiometry looks for the faintest tone you can detect, not whether a comfortable tone is audible. Those are different questions with different answers.
So the honest reading of a result here is narrow: on this device, at this volume, in this room, I stopped noticing the tone somewhere around here. That is genuinely interesting. It is not a number to worry about, and it is not a number to reassure yourself with either.
What should send you to a professional, regardless of anything this page does: ringing or buzzing that persists, hearing that feels muffled, a sudden change in one ear, ear pain, difficulty following conversation in a noisy room, or asking people to repeat themselves more than you used to. Sudden hearing loss in particular is treated as urgent — it is worth being seen quickly rather than experimenting at home.
What lives at each frequency.
The 20 Hz to 20 kHz span is a textbook idealisation of a young, undamaged ear. Real hearing is a curve, most sensitive between roughly 2 and 5 kHz — which is, not coincidentally, where most of the information in speech sits.
| Range | What it is | What you notice |
|---|---|---|
| 20–60 Hz | Sub-bass | Often felt more than heard. Small speakers and earbuds mostly do not reproduce it, so silence here usually means the hardware, not you. |
| 60–250 Hz | Bass | The bottom of most music and the fundamental of a male speaking voice. |
| 250–2000 Hz | Midrange | Where speech mostly lives. Concert pitch A sits at 440 Hz, in the middle of it. |
| 2–5 kHz | Presence | The ear’s most sensitive region — consonants, clarity, and the range hearing aids work hardest on. |
| 5–12 kHz | Brilliance | Air, cymbals, sibilance. Losses here often show up as “I can hear you, I just cannot make out the words.” |
| 12–20 kHz | Ultra-high | Little musical content. This is the part that narrows first, and where headphone roll-off is most likely to confound the result. |
The gradual loss of the top of the range with age is called presbycusis, and it is ordinary rather than alarming — it begins in early adulthood and progresses slowly for everyone. It is not the same thing as noise-induced hearing loss, which is not ordinary, is largely preventable, and typically shows up as a notch around 4 kHz rather than as a shrinking ceiling. We deliberately do not print an “ear age” from your result: the ranges published for each decade are population averages measured under laboratory conditions, and attaching one to an uncalibrated browser tone would turn a rough impression into something that reads like a diagnosis.
Getting a less-bad result.
You cannot make this accurate, but you can stop it being nonsense. Five things account for most of the noise in a result like this.
- Use wired over-ear headphones if you have them. Bluetooth codecs and tiny drivers both do unpredictable things at the top of the range. Whatever you use, use the same pair if you ever repeat this.
- Start from silence. Set the volume to zero, start the tone, and raise it slowly. Going the other way risks a painfully loud high tone before you have registered it as loud — sine waves give you much less warning than music does.
- Work downward from the top. Start at 19 kHz and step down until the tone appears, rather than sweeping up into it. It is easier to notice a sound arriving than to notice one leaving.
- Get somewhere quiet. A fan or street noise will mask exactly the quiet tones you are looking for.
- Check each ear. A clear difference between the two sides is the one result here that is worth acting on — take it to a professional rather than to a slider.
And treat a single session sceptically. Attention, fatigue, a mild cold and how recently you were somewhere loud all move the answer around. If you have been at a concert today, the top of your range will be temporarily depressed; that is your ear protecting itself, and it usually recovers.
Things people reasonably ask.
Is this an accurate hearing test?
No, and it cannot be. A real test uses calibrated equipment at known sound-pressure levels in a controlled room. Here, your headphones’ frequency response, your volume setting and your room noise all change the result, and none of them are measured. Treat it as a listening experiment.
What is the normal human hearing range?
Textbooks give roughly 20 Hz to 20 kHz for a young, undamaged ear. Real sensitivity is far from flat across that span — the ear is most sensitive between about 2 and 5 kHz, which is where most speech information sits.
Why can I not hear anything above 15 kHz?
It may be your hearing, and it may be your equipment. Most consumer headphones and nearly all laptop speakers roll off steeply above 15 kHz, so the tone may never be produced. The top of the range also narrows gradually with age for everyone, which is ordinary rather than alarming.
Does this page tell me how old my ears are?
Deliberately not. The published ranges for each age band are population averages measured under laboratory conditions; attaching one to an uncalibrated browser tone would turn a rough impression into something that reads like a diagnosis. That is the part of these tools that actually misleads people.
Can this damage my hearing?
Any sound can if it is loud enough for long enough, and a sustained sine tone is easier to over-expose yourself to than music because there are no quiet moments in it. Raise the volume from silence rather than lowering it from loud, keep it comfortable, and stop if anything hurts or rings afterwards.
One ear seems worse than the other. What should I do?
See an audiologist or your doctor. A clear difference between ears is the one result from a page like this that is genuinely worth acting on, and a sudden change in one ear is treated as urgent.
Is anything I do here saved?
No. The marks you make live in the page until you close the tab. Nothing is written to storage, and no frequency is sent to analytics — what you can and cannot hear is health information, and this page is treated the same way as the site’s anxiety self-check.
What is the difference between this and the pure tone generator?
The same oscillator, a different range and a different purpose. The pure tone generator covers 60 to 1000 Hz, which is the range that matters for listening and for binaural carriers. This page opens it out to the full audible span so you can probe the edges.