29 ms·
Tone-Deafness Test
- snissn 6y agois this really easy to anyone else?
- cryptofistMonk 6y agoThe audio was very crackly for me, anyone else? Also the dull sine wave was fairly difficult to differentiate at small intervals, I wonder if the researchers considered the effect of different timbres
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Kluny 6y agoThat was fun. I'm more tone deaf than 96% of people, it seems. Not shocking because I'm effectively deaf and have a cochlear implant. The natural hearing in my other ear couldn't hear the tones at all.
- jetrink 6y agoI learned I was tone deaf when playing the game Myst in 1993 when I was eight years old. There was a puzzle[1] in which you had to listen to a tone, cross a room and move a slider until you heard the same tone. I knew exactly what had to be done, but I could not match the tones even after many attempts. Finally, I had to ask for my mom's help. I carried the belief that I was tone-deaf with me for a decade or more until I happened to replay the game and found that as an adult, I had no difficulty completing the puzzle whatsoever. Apparently in my case, tone-deafness was a temporary condition of childhood. I wonder how many people have a childhood memory of not being able to sing in tune or complete a musical puzzle and believe they are tone-deaf for the rest of their lives. 1. https://youtu.be/qP6GU710jV4?t=141 https://youtu.be/qP6GU710jV4?t=141
- LeoPanthera 6y agoIt is possible to solve that puzzle even if you are deaf, by counting the number of notches the slider has moved, which corresponds to the position of the key on the keyboard.
- dylan604 6y agoMusic is like anything else in that it requires practice. At 8 years old, there's really not much learned practice in music really occurring unless you're in family like the Von Trapps. Even listening to kids sing Happy Birthday or The Wheels On The Bus can be quite interesting in how far off the "notes" are. Kids are just mimicking the words. Even the tempo is not of concern. Unless you get some sort of musical training through choir or band or something, you might not ever learn about flat/sharp and how to correct to match the person next to you or more likely the radio.
- retsibsi 6y agoThis makes sense, but in my experience the other kids seemed to somehow gain this knowledge at a young age. It's no surprise that I didn't make any real progress, since I wasn't learning an instrument and my school teachers made us sing but didn't bother trying to teach us to sing -- but by late primary school I was a notably bad singer relative to (almost literally) everyone else in my class. My home was by no means full of music, but we did have a record player and my sister liked to sing with my mother sometimes. And although it took me a while to get interested in pop music, by late primary school I had a CD player and some bands that I liked. So I doubt the difference in ability was solely environmental rather than innate; surely the other kids hadn't all been taught how to sing, or grown up in very musical households. (I'm still very weak musically, and still can't sing, but I'm not literally tone deaf.)
- brodie 6y agoJust to add to the anecdata, I taught myself guitar by copying what I heard on the radio. I was ten years old at the time.
- 6y ago
- lovetocode 6y agoI got a 98%
- omgwtfbyobbq 6y agoDitto, but it took a few tries. My first couple were 85%. I don't have headphones and found that closing my eyes was helpful.
- steve_adams_86 6y agoLikewise, closing my eyes was unintentional at first and then I realized it actually helped quite a bit so I kept doing it. Senses, focus, and the dynamics between them are fascinating.
- gsich 6y agoClose your eyes, it will be easier.
- pizza 6y agoThe first one it gave me was the 1/64th above. I had to mentally adapt my expectation of the amount of focus I had to give to the tones. After that I got them all w/o difficulty. I wonder if the ordering was the same for others, if so this would be a good way to test if there are people who can discern such a difference immediately, without any priming.
- jyoshi 6y agoMine definitely started with a much larger interval. 1/64th only did not come before 1/32th, also. I thought they were trying to trick me as if it was ordered, but in the end, it kinda was for me.
- dylan604 6y agoI wonder if they changed it, as it makes a comment about being able to use the up/down arrow keys based on user feedback. It now does one stage, and then tells you it's about to get harder.
- sprite 6y agoMissed the first one got the rest right.
- wsinks 6y agoIt was not the same. I could just barely barely tell the 1/64th tone, and got it wrong about half the time.
- powersnail 6y agoTwoSet violin did it in a Youtube video and Eddy (the one with perfect pitch) got it quite easily. I suspect anyone with perfect pitch is not going to have any difficulty.
- tempestn 6y agoThe explanation when you finish the test says that it's random. IIRC I got three 1/64ths, of which I got 2/3, so tough to tell whether that's an unlucky mistake, or just getting them by random luck!
- ggm 6y agoRefused to accept KBD input after the mario 8bit chiptune. Loved to try, can't complete. please fix!
- Baeocystin 6y agoI had to switch from Chrome to Firefox for it to work. FWIW.
- OneLeggedCat 6y agoFirefox on Linux failed to play the Mario tune at the beginning. I refreshed, and it then worked. I think they've got some issues.
- anonAndOn 6y agoIt looks like I'm only average at guessing the direction of shift but where do I rank in speed guessing? If they wanted 100% accuracy why highlight the decision time?
- steve_adams_86 6y agoI think they want to know how certain people are about the pitch change, but this isn't a great way to determine that - there are too many reasons response times could vary. I thought this was a distracting part of the test and couldn't see what value it would provide in the end.
- pan69 6y agoI scored 23, I didn't wear headphones. I've always known not to have prefect/absolute pitch. I used to play guitar a lot (I can tune the thing by ear!) but certainly can't sing. I thought the "game" aspect was distracting. I'd preferred if they didn't show the correct/wrong and the timing. During the listening test I decided to look away from the screen and focus elsewhere. I'd like to take this test again but I can't bothered filling out all those questions again. To bad you can't just jump right to the test...
- crmrc114 6y agoThat was really fun I got 32 out of 31 correct. I can't sing at all, so there is that- thanks for posting this goofy little test.
- dylan604 6y agoDoes your lack of ability to sing affect your ability in math? ;-) You got more questions correct than asked??
- crmrc114 6y agoDyslexia is one hell of a drug mate.
- dylan604 6y agoI know that dyslexia causes people to get letters rearranged, but I'm now curious if it causes words to get rearranged as well. Off to look that up now...
- dylan604 6y agoapparently rearranged words is a thing not just letters. "Seeing words backwards sometimes - a person sometimes might see the words backwards."[0] [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Characteristics_of_dyslexia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Characteristics_of_dyslexia
- PeterisP 6y agoWell, that explains why I can't tune a guitar by ear - all the examples where the difference was 1/64 or 1/32 sounded as completely identical four beeps, I had zero idea about the direction and had to guess randomly. I.e. it's not that I could not interpret the difference, it's that I could not identify any difference in the first place.
- contravariant 6y agoThat's why you tune a guitar by listening to the beat in the notes, provided you can get close enough to the right chord you can figure out the rest just by tuning it until the chord stop varying in volume.
- k__ 6y agoI can tune a guitar by hearing and I wasn't very good at the quiz.
- contravariant 6y agoMusicality and being good the quiz might not be related that strongly. Music kind of relies on people being unable to notice difference <1/4 tone, or at least that's the closest you can get to true rational intervals with an equally-tempered piano (other instruments can cheat by changing their notes slightly to sound better).
- jeffbee 6y agoUsually when you tune an instrument you have a simultaneous reference, you don't have to remember the reference. Especially with a guitar, you tune a string against another string at the same time. It is easy (for me) to tune away small differences because the beat frequency is audible. On this test I could not determine the 1/64th differences, I guessed those but I got all the 1/32nd and bigger intervals easily. I have a feeling that off-by-1/64th would be easy to hear if the tones played at the same time.
- heavymark 6y agoDitto.
- spuz 6y agoDid anyone else find the first half of the test harder than the second? I got all of the questions right but the ones where the tone was 1/3 or more of a tone off I really struggled to tell if they were up or down. Weirdly I didn't have that problem on the 1/4 or less questions. I have no musical talent at all by the way.
- jyoshi 6y agoMusic perception varies so it might be easier for you to hear a narrower interval. I can imagine it being closer so it doesn't mess up with your perspective, whereas with a larger difference you might lose your comparison baseline from the first.
- spuz 6y agoYes! I think this is a good explanation. I find it hard to relate two different notes to each other when they are sufficiently different. If they are very different then it obvious but if they are 1-2 tones apart I only really hear them as two different notes rather than one note clearly being higher than the other.
- tomxor 6y agoIt can get even weirder when you jump a gap more than half an octave. For instance say you jump down 6 notes, absolutely speaking it's lower... but relative to the original "note" (not pitch) it's closer to being above than bellow, which can make it feel higher at the same time. I can perceive this higher+lower aspect simultaneously in a lot of music and i suspect this is common even.
- tomxor 6y agoTrue, but this is another dimension of tonal perception I think i.e comparative memory. Kind of like the musical equivalent of short term memory... until you get into scales and more recognizable sequences then that part of the brain seems to have way better memory abilities somehow.
- GloriousKoji 6y agoI have better hearing than most people (upper and lower frequency sensitivity) but I guess I'm pretty tone deaf.
- friendlybus 6y agoWow so many questions. Got 85%, could do better. Interface could be streamlined.
- dylan604 6y agolots of invasive questions.
- omgwtfbyobbq 6y agoDid anyone else have more trouble with a particular direction? I had significantly more difficulty with small descending changes, and I think I have worse hearing on my right side, so I'm wondering if different hemispheres may have be responsible for detecting ascending or descending changes.
- steve_adams_86 6y agoWhen it descends it couldn't be any clearer to me, but on a couple ascents I had to guess.
- jzer0cool 6y agoI got all of them. Is this really a harvard research?
- jeffbee 6y agoThese tests are also interesting. They correspond with my result from the OP, that is I can't reliably determine a 1/64th step in the OP, and I also can't reliably hear a 2-cent difference in this one, although I can distinguish a 5c diff. https://www.audiocheck.net/blindtests_index.php https://www.audiocheck.net/blindtests_index.php
- DonHopkins 6y agoDo you think you're tasteless? Test you flavor perception.
- sudosteph 6y agoYou laugh, but I once threw a "tasting party" for my friends that went along those lines. You can buy a kit with a bunch of test strips with certain chemicals on them on amazon (search "super taster kit") and see who reacts to them and who doesn't. Add in some miracle berries and weird food, and you've got a good time.
- DonHopkins 6y agoLosing your sense of smell and taste is a symptom of COVID-19! Too bad the iSmell never took off and became ubiquitous, or it could be used to screen for COVID-19 symptoms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISmell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISmell https://www.wired.com/1999/11/digiscent/ https://www.wired.com/1999/11/digiscent/
- Ensorceled 6y agoDon't play this game inebriated or in a noisy area ... it requires focus for the 1/64th notes.
- grawprog 6y agoYeah tried it without headphones with my phone pressed against my ear. I barely managed to catch the last two reference tones most of the time after clicking next. The 1/64ths were tough that way. I missed a couple of the first ones but started getting them after I got a good click, get the phone to the head to listen to the tones fast rhythm going on. I recommend headphones at the very least.
- oska 6y agoI found their World Music Quiz more fun (linked at the end of this quiz).
- bobsmooth 6y agoMy hearing is better than I thought. I found it easy to discern between 1/64th notes. I got 31/32.
- sieste 6y ago"You did better than 23% of people." What a polite way of saying "You suck at this!".
- wnissen 6y agoI can hear pitch, but barely. 23/32, and some of those were random guesses. I'm in the 16th percentile! I know that I can't hear pitch very well, and my musically oriented partner says that I always sing "weird" harmonies like 7ths that are not particularly pleasing to the Western ear.
- Andrew_nenakhov 6y agoStrange, I've always considered myself somewhat tone-deaf (when trying to pick a song by ear i can pick 5-8 notes correctly, then i hit the next one, and can't understand if it's higher or lower than I need), but here I got 29/32, and one of those 3 misses was me mistyping in a hurry.
- mehrdadn 6y agoPro tip: Say "yes" when asked if you've taken the test before, and you won't have to answer questions about your background.
- osamagirl69 6y agoTo be honest, I feel like it is a completely fair request for these guys to ask for anonymous demographics (presumably to feed into their research) in exchange for providing this service ad free. I just wish that their certs hadn't expired before I got a chance to try it!
- mehrdadn 6y agoDid you actually get a chance to see their questions? I wouldn't have posted my comment if they were less invasive or if people could skip more of them. But they seemed too invasive to me. They didn't even try to (to give just one example) request age ranges like many other demographic surveys do, instead asking for exactly how many years old you are, which seemed kind of unnecessary. I wouldn't be surprised if some subset of their data points were sufficient to identify a decent number of people uniquely.
- tomxor 6y agoNote that speed is not being judged, I found it significantly easier to get 32/32 after realizing this might be the case. For some reason I find +1/64th harder to distinguish than -1/64th, is it possible to have asymmetrical perception differences this subtle? or is it more likely software / hardware limitations?
- sudosteph 6y agoI actually had the same experience, with -1/64 being much easier to hear. I don't have a good hypothesis as to why that would be either. I'm using pretty lousy headphones, fwiw.
- tomxor 6y agoI feel like this is likely due to some kind of quantization. I'm doing my best to figure it out with my armchair sound theory but i'm very far from an expert in that or PCM... correction invited: A semitone at 440 = +-26.16 Hz 1/64 = 26.16/32 = +-0.8175 Hz So i guess the question is: Are 0.8175 Hz differences close to limitations of PCM at a normal 48 KHz sample rate for reasonable tone lengths? 48000/440 = 109.0909090909091 48000/440.8175 = 108.88859902340538 So for 440 Hz there are either 109 or 110 points per sinusoid, averaging 109.09. For 440.8175 Hz there are either 108 or 109 points per sinusoid averaging 108.88 Although the true sinusoid doesn't start and end at exactly on those points, this is how many points "land" on each period. There are also subtle differences in the amplitude of each point on different periods with the same number of points - i'm not sure how to rate that in terms of perception but my suspicion is that we are affected more by the average period, by using the highest/lowest points (half a period). If true, the duration becomes very important, 108 periods fit into 1 second, which gives us a max precision of 1/108 = about 0.93% i.e +-1.013 Hz error... which is larger than the difference we are trying to detect. I'm not confident in these calculations, but It does at least seem very close to the precision limit of 48KHz... So I'm guessing the starting position of the modulation has quite an influence on which way that error swings, and this could account for the differences we are hearing between +1/64 and -1/64 </ hand waving>
- 6y ago
- Gene_Parmesan 6y agoReal tone-deafness (amusia) is fairly rare. Something like 20% of people self-report it, but the actual prevalence is only ~4%. What most people seem to mean when they say they have it is "I can't sing at all." But really tone-deafness is not about singing poorly, it's about not being able to discriminate tones. This includes you vocalizing them, yes, but it also includes you hearing them. In fact I would hazard a guess that if you are able to tell you are off-pitch while you're singing, then that might in and of itself preclude tone deafness (although my understanding may be off there). What I do know is that most people with amusia cannot and do not enjoy listening to music. Many say it sounds like noise, or just sounds unpleasant. And People with amusia tend to have other, related issues -- difficulties discerning pitch in spoken sentences (was that intonation representing a question or a statement? that sort of thing).
- magneticnorth 6y agoI've definitely made this distinction before about myself - "I can't sing, but I can at least sing badly in tune"
- dehrmann 6y agoJokes aside, I doubt this. If you sing a song in your range on pitch, it'll probably sound OK. Maybe not amazing singer good, but a lot of rock singers aren't "good" singers, they're just good enough to get a good take. If you're curious, record yourself and put it in Melodyne.
- o_class_star 6y agoI'm curious: how do people who are tone deaf learn and use tonal languages? Are such languages redundant enough that they can get by, or do they find other ways of adapting, or do they struggle to speak fluently even if the tonal language is their first language?
- dehrmann 6y agoIsn't there a theory that native speakers of tonal languages are better at music because they're better at recognizing tones?
- sieste 6y agoDo you think having high quality headphones makes this easier?
- sturmeh 6y agoI would guess that having a "baseline" pair of headphones would make this "as easy as possible". I wouldn't be surprised if there were headphones that didn't meet that requirement.
- antisthenes 6y agoWow, never thought that getting 70% right would put me right into the bottom quartile of people. And I took the test in a quiet place with good headphones. Guess I am partially tone-deaf...
- jojobas 6y agoAaaaand a lapsed ssl certificate.
- sturmeh 6y agoApparently https://letsencrypt.org/ https://letsencrypt.org/ is too hard!
- anilakar 6y agoIt is, when you write a cronjob to update it and then Certbot autoinstalls a competing (daily/monthly, can't remember) cronjob that breaks the one you had set up a year ago.
- elitistphoenix 6y ago10/21/2020, 11:59:59 PM (Coordinated Universal Time)
- anonytrary 6y ago> Sorry! It seems there was an error preparing your experiment. Please try reloading the page in a few minutes. If the error persists please contact us here. > Error creating a user. Is the database offline? Original Message: Error: Network Error Hug of death?
- est31 6y agoNo, just the certificate expired. The site is hosted on AWS and there are valid AWS related certificates registered in public logs [0], but they aren't deployed on the website, instead a certificate with 2 year long validity that expired just a few minutes ago [1]. Even if you click on the "I know the risk, I accept" button, it tries to connect to api.musiclab.org through CORS. This fails due to the same certificate issue and gives the error you report. Bad luck I guess that it expires right when it gets viral on hn. [0]: https://crt.sh/?id=2886689176 https://crt.sh/?id=2886689176 [1]: https://crt.sh/?id=882377045 https://crt.sh/?id=882377045
- jiveturkey 6y ago> Bad luck I guess that it expires right when it gets viral on hn. This right here is the problem with privacy and security. low expectations. It isn't bad luck, it's below baseline level secops/SRE. I mean, sure, it's probably a low effort, low investment toy site, but this is very baseline stuff. If you aren't going to manage a cert properly, just don't use TLS at all!
- chrisfosterelli 6y agoIt's an engineering mistake that it expired, but bad luck that it expired today. (That said, everyone makes mistakes now and again)
- lucb1e 6y ago> it tries to connect to api.musiclab.org through CORS. This fails due to the same certificate issue Thanks for the hint! It works now that I visited the api subdomain separately, accepted the warning, and go back to the test. The test sound now plays (though you might need to give it a second).
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- causality0 6y agoOut of curiosity, how bad do your speakers need to be for a 1/64 input signal difference to be more similar than 1/64 in the output tone?
- dehrmann 6y agoI'd guess the DAC has more to do with it than the speakers because speakers should reproduces waves pretty reliably. But I'm just guessing.
- dsr_ 6y agoMost DACs are nearly perfect. There's an incredibly large number that will do better than 96dB of signal/noise, including the $9 Apple dongle. Electronics are highly consistent for this purpose. Speakers are up to 3 orders of magnitude worse.
- dehrmann 6y agoFor reproducing a frequency, shouldn't speakers also be nearly perfect because of the physics involved? Yes, the frequency response might be all over the place, but does it matter when playing a tone?
- dsr_ 6y agoI don't know what you mean by "because of the physics involved". Suppose you send a 440Hz square wave, amplitude -1 to +1 V, to a speaker, and use a top-quality microphone and a reasonable oscilloscope to look at the resulting wave in the air. Here are perfectly normal things that you can expect to observe: - the wave is no longer square - the beginning of each cycle (attack) is louder than the middle - the middle of the cycle is louder than the attack - the attack and decay are both ringing with new high frequencies that you didn't send in - integer multiples of the frequency are audible - the sympathetic vibration of the speaker enclosure is nearly as loud as the signal - it's very good as long as you hold the mic in exactly the right spot, but if you move it you get different distortions - the speaker catches on fire (this excludes plasma speakers, which are supposed to be on fire when active) All of these things are because of physics.
- emdax 6y ago-> Try to visit site: Error: Sorry! It seems there was an error preparing your experiment. Please try reloading the page in a few minutes. -> Try to send feedback: Form with high barrier required fields rapidly drains any enthusiasm to send feedback.
- defanor 6y agoAt least there's no captcha, no requirement to register, and it appears to work (I've reported the same issue). I'd prefer a working email address, but there are worse feedback forms around.
- kobayashi 6y ago@parsianka if you own this website letting you know that the TLS cert has expired
- floatingatoll 6y agoThat doesn’t work on HN in any useful way, unfortunately. I emailed this to one of the site owners, though!
- dehrmann 6y agoSort of the opposite, is there a way to train perfect pitch? I know it isn't supposed to be trainable, but I've dabbled in guitar for 10+ years and singing for 5+, and I'm at a point where I'll randomly hear a chord--nothing fancy, just a triad--and I suddenly place it in song with the same chord in the same key. I'm not sure if I'm actually matching pitch, or if I'm picking up on timbre differences.
- mjburgess 6y agoI believe it's possible to infer pitch from comparison with memory like this. The issue is that you need to remember a note in a song which sounds like the note you're hearing -- quite hard, given instruments/context/etc.
- null0pointer 6y agoRelative pitch can definitely be trained. And I've heard people with perfect pitch say that when they hear a note they just relate it to a known note. Though I don't know if that's true perfect pitch or a different means to the same end. Then again I've heard other musicians say that perfect pitch is like seeing colors. You and I just know red is red, they might just hear C is C.
- spuz 6y agoI watched a video once of an adult that taught himself perfect pitch. It turned out the way he learnt it was a little different than how a child might learn it as he had to use reference points in his mind and then use relative pitch to calculate the actual note. This would take him quite a long time compared to someone who had learnt it young who could tell you the note straight away almost without thinking. I can't find the video now but there are many other similar videos on YouTube.
- bradknowles 6y agoTheir SSL certificate appears to have expired as of October 21, 2020. And the site itself seems to be broken.
- dusted 6y agoYes, and to make matters worse, if I politely ask for the HTTP protocol, which wouldn't exhibit this problem, I'm rudely redirected to the brokwn HTTPS version.. Seriously, I couldn't care less who sees that I'm visiting this site, I don't need privacy here, I just want to try the funny internet thingy..
- wodenokoto 6y agoI'm getting this warning about certs being out of date and that the site might be an attack vector
- Blackstone4 6y agoAs a kid, I struggled in music class and could not follow music, sing or keep a beat. I couldn’t clap in time and we were just expected to do it without any real teaching...still to this day I struggle with all these things despite loving music. I also take longer than others to reproduce sounds and speak in foreign languages. I have good understanding but my difficulty is in recreating the sounds in both verbally/talking and musically/singing
- bshimmin 6y agoI took this twice, the first time without headphones and panicking slightly at the 1/64ths - I got 27; the second time, I did it with a (decent) pair of headphones and with less panicking, and got a perfect score. The 1/64ths were still hard, but I found, amusingly, that I shifted my head slightly in the right direction each time! For reference, I have no musical ability whatsoever and am broadly regarded as one of the worst singers anyone has ever met, but I do enjoy listening to music very much.
- sigsergv 6y agoI failed some tests because I pressed wrong button. It's something not related to music, I've never been able to play games with QTE, and this looks much like those QTE I loathe.