What this pitch test measures
Every round plays two short notes, one after the other. One of them is a little higher than the other, and your only job is to say which way the second note went. Get two rounds in a row right and the next pair is closer together. Miss one and the gap opens up again. Over 24 rounds the gap settles around the smallest difference you can reliably hear, and that is your result.
This is called pitch discrimination, and it is the finest-grained part of relative pitch. It is what lets a guitarist hear that a string is slightly flat before looking at a tuner, a singer find the centre of a note, and a string player put a finger exactly where the note lives.
What a cent is
Pitch differences this small are measured in cents. A cent is one hundredth of a semitone, and a semitone is the step between two neighbouring keys on a piano. So a result of 25 cents means you can hear a difference a quarter the size of the smallest step on a keyboard, and a result of 5 cents means one twentieth of it. It is the same unit your tuner's needle shows, which is why tuner accuracy is quoted in cents too.
What your result means
Lower is finer. The bands below are a guide to where your ear is today, not a ceiling. One round played on laptop speakers in a noisy room can easily read twice as wide as the same ear on headphones.
| Result | Cents | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Finely tuned | Under 5 | A twentieth of a semitone or finer. This is the level highly trained listeners reach. |
| Sharp | 5-12 | You hear the kind of drift that makes a chord sound slightly sour before anyone else in the room does. |
| Musical | 12-25 | A good working ear. Plenty to tune by ear and to hear when a note is off centre. |
| Warming up | Over 25 | Very common on a first go, and the band that improves fastest. A few short sessions usually move it a long way. |
Yes, your ear can get sharper
Fine pitch hearing is a trained skill rather than a fixed gift. In a 2006 study, Christophe Micheyl and colleagues measured listeners with no musical training and found their thresholds started about six times wider than those of classical musicians. After roughly four to eight hours of practice spread over sessions, the untrained group had caught up with the musicians.
Three habits help most:
- Practise little and often. Two or three runs of this test a day will do more than one long session a week.
- Tune by ear first, then check. Tune a string against a reference by ear, then look at the tuner to see how close you got. The check after the guess is the part that trains you.
- Hold notes against a drone. Playing a long note over a steady reference tone makes small pitch errors audible as a slow wobble called beating. The free tuning drone does this in your browser, and the intonation practice guide explains the routine.
Questions about pitch tests
What is a cent?
What is a good pitch test score?
Can you train your ear to hear smaller pitch differences?
Is this the same as a perfect pitch test?
Why did I get a different result the second time?
Is this pitch test free?
Put that ear to work.
Metro Gnome has a chromatic tuner that holds steady in a noisy room and a tuning drone for practising intonation by ear, with your reference pitch shared between them. Free, no account, no subscription.
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