Who makes Hearkle

Hearkle is built and maintained by Lajos Toldi, a qualified educator (MA in teaching) and PhD candidate in adaptive intelligent tutoring systems at AI24EduLabs, a research lab in the AI24Labs portfolio. That background shapes the whole approach: Hearkle treats pitch as a skill you can train directly, and its games are designed as small, adaptive daily listening exercises. Lajos designs the games and the measurement approach, and writes and edits the guides. Claims about hearing and pitch perception are checked against authoritative sources and cited on each page. See our editorial policy for how sources are chosen and how AI-assisted drafting is used and reviewed. Hearkle stays free, collects no student data, and is supported by optional passes and unobtrusive ads.

Hearkle is one of three perception-training hubs from AI24EduLabs, alongside Huekle (colour) and Chronkle (tempo); the lab also builds AI24Tutors. AI24EduLabs is part of AI24Labs, together with AI24MediLabs and AI24EcoLabs.

What I work on

All of it, honestly. I design and build the daily games, from the rules down to the tones you hear and the scoring. I write the guides in the Learn section, and I run the measurement approach that turns each game into a rough read on your ear. When something feels off in a game, I'm the one who plays it a hundred times to find out why. There's no content team behind the curtain. It's one person, which keeps the whole thing consistent and keeps me accountable for it.

The honest limit of my expertise

I want to be plain about where my authority ends. The pedagogy here is genuinely mine: how a skill gets broken into daily reps, how feedback is shaped, how a game meets a beginner and a trained ear at their own level. The claims about hearing and psychoacoustics are a different matter. I'm not an audiologist or a hearing scientist, so anything the guides say about how the ear resolves pitch, how frequency maps to sensation, or how hearing shifts with age is sourced from the research and cited, not spoken from personal authority. There is no panel of invented specialists here, and I won't pretend there is. One educator, reading the science carefully and pointing you to it.

How to reach me

Email is the way: hello@hearkle.com. I read what comes in, and I'm glad to hear about a bug, a confusing sentence, or a game idea. One thing to note: Hearkle has no user accounts and no logins, and nothing you do in a game leaves your device. So if you write to me, I only know what you choose to tell me. There's no profile or history for me to look up on my end.

How the content is made

If you want to know how the guides get written and checked, or how a claim earns its place on the page, the editorial policy lays that out. And if you're curious what a game's score actually means, and what it doesn't, the methodology page explains how the measurements work and where they stop. I'd rather you understand the limits up front than trust a number that was never meant to be clinical.

Why this exists

Teaching taught me that people improve at what they get to practise on a regular schedule, and that a small daily rep beats a rare heroic session. Hearing whether one tone is higher or lower than another, and by how much, is a skill almost nobody practises on purpose, even though it sits underneath music, language, and plenty else. Hearkle is my attempt to make that practice easy to reach: open the page, play a short game, and get a little feedback on how your ear did today. Come back tomorrow and watch the trend. That's the whole idea, and it's free because it should be.

More about the project