A tone deaf test you take by singing.

How the tone deaf test works

Press Start and sing any note that feels easy, so the test can put its notes where your voice is. Then it plays eight different notes, up to five semitones either side of that one, in a shuffled order. After each, sing it back on “ah” and hold it for a second. The test listens only once the note has stopped, so speakers are fine, and it leaves out the scoop at the start of your note before it measures.

Each answer is measured in cents, hundredths of a semitone, from the note played. A note sung an octave higher or lower counts as a match: a deep voice answering a high tone an octave down has heard it right. Within 50 cents, your note rounds to the right note. Within 100 cents, you are less than a semitone away. At the end the roll shows all eight: the note played outlined, and where you sang it as a solid line.

Song Cage is a songwriting app for chords, lyrics and melody, and the test uses the same note detection it uses when you sing a melody into a song. Each slice of audio becomes a note and is thrown away, so nothing is recorded, and the microphone switches off when the test ends.

Are you really tone deaf?

Probably not. Tone deafness, which researchers call congenital amusia, is a lifelong difficulty hearing differences in pitch. In the largest study of it, 16,625 adults took three online listening tests, and about 1.5% met the criteria (Peretz and Vuvan, 2017). The 4% figure still quoted for it came from a single test in 1980.

Far more people believe they are tone deaf. Before one study, 59% of 1,105 university students said they could not imitate a melody by singing. When Peter Pfordresher and Steven Brown then tested people without musical training, 10 to 15% sang notes back at least a semitone off, and those poor-pitch singers told pitches apart as well as the good singers did. Their trouble was in turning a heard pitch into a sung one, not in hearing it (Pfordresher and Brown, 2007).

Speed matters too. In a study of 62 occasional singers, only a minority made many pitch errors, and when 15 of them sang the same song slowly, most sang as accurately as professional singers (Dalla Bella, Giguère and Peretz, 2007). This test measures the singing side. A formal check for amusia is a listening test, in which you say whether two melodies are the same or different.

What your score means

The score is the average distance between the notes played and the notes you sang, octaves set aside.

What each average distance from the note means

Average distance	What it means
Under 25 cents	Right on the notes. Each one lands within a quarter of a semitone of the note played.
25 to 50 cents	On pitch. Every note rounds to the right one, with some wobble.
50 to 100 cents	Close. Within a semitone, but loose. Slowing down and holding each note longer usually tightens it.
Over 100 cents	More than a semitone off, the line researchers use for poor-pitch singing. Usually the link between ear and voice, not the ear.

How to sing more in tune

• Slow down. Hold each note longer than feels natural before you move to the next. Tempo was the biggest difference between occasional and professional singers in the study above.
• Slide into the note. Start a little below it and slide up slowly until your voice and the note sound the same, then hold it there.
• Watch it as you sing. The pitch detector shows which way you are off and by how many cents, so you can correct by eye until your ear takes over.
• Stay in your range. Notes near the edges of a voice are the hardest to tune. The vocal range test finds the keys that keep a song in the middle of yours.