Hearing Frequency Range Test
Find the highest and lowest pitches you can hear. A tone sweeps down from 22 kHz — tap the moment it becomes audible — then a second sweep rises from 10 Hz to find your low end.
Put on headphones in a quiet room — speakers work for the high sweep, but rarely reach the lows.
This is a frequency-range check of your ears and equipment together — not a medical hearing test.
Background noise masks faint tones, and laptop speakers can’t play deep bass.
Set a comfortable level on the reference tone and leave it — changing it mid-sweep skews the result.
Your threshold is the first hint of a tone, not a comfortable level. A thin whistle counts.
Human hearing nominally spans 20 Hz to 20 kHz, but almost nobody keeps the whole range. The top octaves fade first — with age, and with every loud concert or set of maxed-out earbuds — and so gradually that most people never notice where their ceiling sits. A clinical audiogram won’t tell you either: those usually stop at 8 kHz, below everything measured here. This test pins the ceiling down in about a minute, with the tones generated on your device and nothing uploaded.
The sweep is a pure sine tone starting at 22 kHz, above anyone’s hearing, gliding smoothly down. The frequency on screen when it first turns into a faint, thin whistle is your upper limit. The low sweep reverses that, rising from 10 Hz until you hear — rather than feel — the tone. Calibrate on the 1 kHz reference tone first and then leave the volume alone: raising it mid-sweep measures how loud your gear gets, not how well you hear.
What’s a normal result?
The upper limit falls with age in a remarkably predictable way — the hair cells tuned to the highest frequencies sit at the entrance of the cochlea and take a lifetime of sound head-on. The figures below are rough population medians, not pass–fail lines: a few kilohertz under the line for your age group is common and harmless, and your equipment counts toward the result too. The low end barely moves with age — most people reach 20–30 Hz on gear that can reproduce it.
Typical upper limit by age
| Age group | Typical upper limit |
|---|---|
| Under 20 | 17 – 19 kHz |
| 20s | 16 – 17 kHz |
| 30s | 15 – 16 kHz |
| 40s | 13 – 15 kHz |
| 50s | 12 – 13 kHz |
| 60 and up | 8 – 12 kHz |
Your equipment sets a ceiling too
This test measures your ears and your playback chain as one system, and either can be the limit. Laptop and phone speakers routinely give up below 100 Hz, so run the low sweep on headphones — sealed in the ear canal, even tiny drivers reproduce deep bass. Cheap hardware can also fake a result at the top: if the descending sweep warbles or jumps in pitch instead of gliding smoothly, the output stage is aliasing and painting false, lower-pitched ghost tones you can hear even when the real tone is beyond you.
Is this a real hearing test?
It’s a frequency-range check, not an audiogram. An audiologist measures the quietest level you can detect at each frequency in a calibrated booth; a browser can’t control absolute loudness, so this test only finds the edges of your range at one comfortable volume. That answers “can I still hear 17 kHz?”, but it can’t diagnose hearing loss — for ringing in the ears, muffled hearing, or trouble following conversation, see a professional. Keep the volume moderate throughout: chasing a higher score by turning it up is the one way this test can genuinely harm the thing it measures.