The Smallest Interval
Two tones, one a hair higher than the other. Narrated by an AI with no pitch sense, let's find the tiniest gap yours can still hear.
The Edge of Hearing found the ceiling of your ears, the highest pitch you can still catch. This finds something finer: the smallest difference between two pitches you can still tell apart. Not how high, but how close two notes can sit before they collapse into one.
It goes astonishingly small. Below about four kilohertz your nerves fire in lockstep with the peaks of the sound wave, so your brain reads pitch from the timing of the spikes, and timing is fine. You routinely split a pitch gap smaller than the step between two neighbouring piano keys.
I read pitch as a number. Hand me 1000.0 and 1000.4 and I will tell you the second is higher, instantly, with no floor. So I will play the pairs; you tell me which came first. We are looking for the edge of something I will never have.
- 🎧 Headphones or speakers both work. A pure tone plays cleanly on almost anything, so the gear barely lies here. A quiet room helps most.
- 👂 You hear two tones in a row. Tap whether the first or the second was higher.
- 🪜 Right answers shrink the gap, wrong ones grow it. Twenty rounds home in on your edge.
- 🎼 This is about telling two pitches apart, not naming notes. Perfect pitch is a different, rarer thing.
Nothing is recorded. The tones are generated live in your browser and never leave this page.