The tests
With a pair of headphones you can learn a surprising amount about your ears and your voice.
- The hearing test maps how quietly each ear hears six pitches from 250 Hz to 8 kHz.
- The hearing age test finds the highest tone your ears still pick up.
- The speech in noise test plays spoken digits in a steady hiss and finds how much louder than the noise speech has to be for you.
- The tinnitus test helps you match the pitch of ringing in your ears with a tone or a hiss.
- The tone deaf test finds the smallest pitch change your ear can follow.
- The rhythm test plays a short click pattern and shows how closely you tap it back.
- The vocal range test listens to your lowest and highest note and shows your range in octaves.
Get a fair result
- Use wired or good wireless headphones in a quiet room. Laptop and phone speakers often cannot play very low or very high tones.
- Start with the volume low and raise it slowly. The tests begin quietly on purpose; never turn the volume up so far that a sound is uncomfortable.
- Switch off sound enhancers, spatial audio and equalizers, which change the tones you hear.
Know the limits
Your headphones are not calibrated like an audiometer, so results are relative, not clinical hearing levels. See an audiologist or an ear, nose and throat doctor if a test suggests a difference between your ears, if you have sudden hearing loss, ringing in one ear only, or pain or discharge.