Perfect pitch test

Take the perfect pitch test in three steps

1. Choose a mode, a sound and a note range, and use headphones or decent speakers at a comfortable volume.
2. Press Start the test. Each note plays once; listen, then click its name on the keyboard (any octave counts). Use Play again if you missed it. In perfect pitch mode, a short burst of random notes plays first so the previous answer cannot serve as a reference.
3. After the last note you see your accuracy, how often you were within a semitone, your average answer time, and a note-by-note breakdown.

Perfect pitch and relative pitch

Absolute pitch, usually called perfect pitch, is the ability to name or sing a note without hearing any reference note first. It is rare in the general population; the figure most often quoted is around 1 in 10,000, though estimates vary widely and it is far more common among musicians who began lessons in early childhood. Relative pitch is the ability to name a note from its distance to a known one, for example hearing that a note is a fifth above C, so it must be G. Almost every trained musician relies on relative pitch, and it can be learned at any age. This page tests both: perfect pitch mode plays notes with no reference, and relative pitch mode tells you the first note.

How the test is built

Notes are synthesized in your browser from equal-tempered frequencies with A4 = 440 Hz: a piano-like tone with decaying harmonics, an organ-like tone, or a pure sine wave, which has no timbre clues and is the hardest. The note is chosen at random within the range you pick, never the same note name twice in a row. Answers count by note name only, so C3 and C5 are both C; octave naming is much harder and is not tested here. Before each note in perfect pitch mode, a quick run of random notes in other keys clears your short-term memory of the last one, which is a common way to stop people from using the previous note as a reference.

Reading your score

Out of 20 notes, random guessing gets about 1 or 2 right (8%). Without absolute pitch, scores usually stay near chance, lifted a little by lucky guesses and remembered notes. People who score near 100% quickly and reliably on sine waves, across several sessions, may have absolute pitch; strong musicians often do well on piano tones because they know the sound of their own instrument, which is sometimes called timbre-specific pitch memory. Near misses, one semitone away, are typical of good relative pitch combined with a remembered reference such as a tuning note. The note-by-note table shows which notes you confuse, often neighbours on the keyboard.

Can you learn perfect pitch?

Studies on adults show that training can raise scores on tests like this one, sometimes a lot, but whether that becomes true absolute pitch is still debated. Practising is still useful: naming notes trains your ear, and relative pitch, which improves reliably with practice, is what most musical tasks actually need. Ten minutes a day with the relative pitch mode, starting with a one-octave range, is a reasonable plan. If you want to know the note you are singing instead, use the pitch detector.