Heardrift

What Heardrift trains

Heardrift trains pitch stability: noticing that a sustained tone has started to wander and pushing it back on centre before it gets away. Unlike the games that judge two separate tones, this one never stops: the tone is live for the whole round, the drift is continuous, and your correction runs alongside your listening. That closed loop of hearing the error, acting, then hearing the result of acting is what a singer runs on a long note and a string or wind player on every sustained tone.

How to play

A countdown starts the round, then a tone begins and immediately starts to drift on its own. Hold ▲ higher to raise the pitch and ▼ lower to lower it, pressing and holding rather than tapping. The Arrow keys do the same job. Your job is to keep the tone inside the target zone, a band of 30 cents either side of centre, just under a third of a semitone in each direction.

A marker on the rail shows where the pitch sits and stays calm while you are inside the zone; the further out you drift, the larger and redder its halo grows. No cents figure is ever shown while you play, so you steer by ear with a visual confirmation rather than reading a number. The daily run is three rounds of 15 seconds, and the drift gets faster each round.

How scoring works

Each round scores the percentage of the time you spent inside the zone, and your Lock-score is the average of the three rounds, out of 100. Time is all that counts: being briefly far out costs the same as being briefly just out, so recovering quickly matters more than never slipping. A Lock-score of 60 or more earns the day toward your streak. The result screen also draws a twelve-segment seismograph showing where in the run you were holding and where you lost it.

What your score means

Read the Lock-score as a rough band, not a verdict:

Outcome	Rough interpretation
Lock 60 or above	Steady tracking, and the only threshold the game itself uses, and the score that earns the day
Below 60, but a strong round one	You hold it while the drift is slow; the faster rounds are outrunning your corrections
Below 60 across all three rounds	Chasing the drift rather than anticipating it, usually by correcting too late and too hard

Round three is meant to be hard, so a strong round one with a weak round three is a normal shape rather than a failure.

Common mistakes

Over-correcting is the classic error: you hold the button until the tone is clearly back, by which point you have pushed it out the other side and set up an oscillation. Short taps of the hold, released early, beat one long press. Second, waiting for certainty: by the time a drift is obvious it has already cost you seconds. Third, watching the marker instead of listening; the display is a confirmation, not the instrument. Fourth, playing on speakers in a noisy room, where a slow drift of a few cents simply disappears.

Practice progression

(5 min, beginner) play the daily three rounds and aim only to make your corrections shorter, not fewer. (10 min, intermediate) use the practice tab, where the zone widens to 45 cents or narrows to 20 and the round runs from 8 to 30 seconds; a wide zone teaches patience, a narrow one precision. (weekly) try Survival, the endless mode: the drift keeps accelerating and a health bar drains while you are out of the zone. Pair it with Hearfork so the differences you are correcting are ones you can actually hear.

The science behind it

Holding a pitch is a control problem, not a perception problem alone. You compare what you hear against a remembered target, estimate the error, and issue a correction. Because that correction takes time to hear, any delay in the loop turns into overshoot, which is why over-correcting produces a wobble rather than a fix. Singers face the same loop with an extra complication: they hear themselves through bone conduction as well as through the air, so their feedback is colored. Held notes drift in the first place because muscles fatigue, breath pressure falls, and there is no external reference to lock onto. Our guide to pitch drift and holding a note covers the causes and the cure, and cents explains the unit the zone is measured in.

Limitations

Heardrift is a game and an informal self-check, not a clinical or diagnostic tool. It measures how well you steer a tone with two buttons, which is related to but not the same as holding a pitch with your voice or your hands. Browser audio and display timing vary between devices, so results are not strictly comparable, and one 45-second run reflects attention and fatigue as much as skill.

Where it shows up

Pitch stability is the difference between a held note that sounds intentional and one that sounds like it is sagging. A singer holding the last note of a phrase has no fret and no key to lean on; the note is kept in place by continuous small corrections that the audience never hears. An unaccompanied choir drifts flat over a few minutes because everyone is correcting to everyone else and the group has nothing external to hold onto. A violinist sustaining a note with vibrato is deliberately moving the pitch, and still has to keep the centre of that movement in one place. A trombonist has a slide with no positions marked precisely enough for the job, so the ear finishes what the arm starts. Wind players face a version of it every time the instrument warms up and the whole pitch rises under them, and a bagpiper spends a set nudging drones that never quite stop moving. Outside performance the same loop runs whenever a tone is a readout: a piano technician holding a note against a fork while adjusting the pin, a theremin player who has no fixed reference at all, an engineer keeping a test oscillator on frequency by ear while the equipment warms. Language teachers meet it in students who can hear a pitch is wrong but cannot hold the correction for a whole phrase. In all of these the skill is not hearing a difference once, but hearing it continuously and acting small and early. That is the loop Heardrift isolates, and then speeds up until it breaks.

Frequently asked questions

How wide is the target zone?

Thirty cents either side of centre in the daily run, under a third of a semitone each way. Practice mode sets it from 45 down to 20.

Should I tap the buttons or hold them?

Hold them. The controls move the pitch continuously while pressed, so a short hold released early is the right correction.

Why does my score drop in round three?

The drift speeds up every round, by design. A falling profile across the three rounds is normal.

What is Survival mode?

An endless run instead of three fixed rounds: the drift keeps accelerating and a health bar drains while you are outside the zone, and the score is seconds survived. Survival keeps its own streak, separate from the daily Lock-score streak, and lasting 30 seconds is what counts as a win for it.

Can I play without looking at the screen?

Yes. The marker helps, but the tone carries what you need, and a live status message announces when you are in the zone or drifting, and which way.

Related reading & games

• Pitch drift and holding a note: why held notes wander.
• What pitch is and cents: the sensation and the unit.
• Hearfork and Hearecho: resolution and memory, the two ingredients of a steady note.
• All ear-training guides.