Hearing Bench
Listening to a fresh episode of The Rest Is Science — Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens's new Goalhanger show — titled This Episode Will Make You Angry. Nothing to do with hearing. The idea for a hearing tool just showed up while it was on. That's how it works sometimes. Credit where the trigger came from; hope it finds them one day.
Nine tests, pure Web Audio, no upload, no calibration to lie about:
- HF threshold — the classic mosquito-tone age indicator
- Audiogram sweep — per-ear thresholds at 125 Hz → 16 kHz, plotted on the usual red/blue chart
- Balance — pan a tone until it feels centred; if it doesn't, that's data
- Frequency & loudness JND — smallest pitch and volume differences you can actually detect
- Temporal gap detection — how short a silence between two tones you can still hear
- Tinnitus matcher — pin down a repeatable frequency + level match for what you already hear internally
- Missing fundamental — the demo where your brain constructs a note nobody's playing
- Binaural beats — a phantom rhythm that exists only in your head
None of this is a clinical audiogram. No calibrated SPL is possible in a browser — the numbers are relative to your hardware. Read them as "here's my instrument's shape today", not "here's my hearing in dB HL".
Lives at /soundscape/hearing-bench. Results save to your browser's localStorage and stay there — no server, no telemetry, no account, no export unless you copy it out yourself.
Start low on the volume. It's easy to hurt yourself with a slider.