This surprisingly tough web game, from the Music Lab at the Harvard University Department of Psychology, tests how well you can distinguish tones by pitch. Put on your headphones and judge — as fast as you can — whether certain tones are higher or lower than others.
Just be ready to disappoint yourself. I scored in the 59th percentile and I still feel as though I’ve somehow failed at music.
But if you want to feel better about your tin ear, test out whether you (or your audio system) can tell the difference between high-bitrate music and low-bitrate music. Because if you can’t, then hey, you’ll never need to pay for the more expensive high-quality music streaming services!
The Harvard site also lets you take more culturally interesting quizzes, where you try to identify the purpose of music from different cultures. (We suspect the tone quiz will also contribute to research about different cultures, which often use different tonal scales.)
And if you’ve taken any other good listening tests online, share them so we can all get really mad at our own ears.
Tone-deafness test | Harvard University Music Lab (via The Verge)
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