Hearkle
Guess today's tone in 5 tries. Match the pitch by ear.
About Hearkle — matching a pitch by ear
Hearkle trains pitch matching — the ear-and-voice skill of homing in on a target pitch until yours lines up with it. It is the same skill a singer uses to land on the right note and a player uses to tune a string to a reference. Each attempt teaches your ear to turn "a little too high" or "too low" into a smaller, surer correction.
Each day gives you one hidden tone and five tries. Play a guess, hear whether it sits above or below the target, and adjust — narrowing the gap round by round until you match it.
Matching a pitch starts with hearing it clearly. Our guide to what pitch is explains how the ear turns frequency into the sensation of high and low. Browse the full set of ear-training guides to pair each game with the theory behind it.
What Hearkle trains
Hearkle works your pitch matching: moving your own tone onto a target you can only hear, and closing the gap until the two line up. One hidden tone is chosen for the day, the same one for everyone. You move a slider, hear what you have made, and read back whether you sit above or below it. The number beside the slider is your guess, never the goal, so the judgement comes from the ear.
How to play
Press Play the target tone to hear what you are aiming at. Move the slider between Lower and Higher, press Hear my guess to audition it, and when you are ready press Lock in guess. You get five tries. Each locked guess adds a bar showing how close you were, plus a direction: higher, lower, or spot on once you are within about a tenth of a semitone. The round ends early once you land that close. Every control is reachable by keyboard, and the slider announces its frequency for screen readers.
How scoring works
Your result is your best single guess, not an average, so a wild first attempt costs nothing except a try. Closeness is measured in cents, the logarithmic unit that makes a gap low in the range comparable to the same gap high up. The closing screen shows the true target and your best guess in Hz, and the distance in cents. Press Target vs. your best to hear the two back to back, which is usually more informative than the number. A best guess of 85% or better earns the day towards your streak.
What your score means
Read the percentage as a band, not a verdict:
| Outcome | Rough interpretation |
|---|---|
| Spot on, within about 12 cents | The game ends the round there and calls it a perfect ear |
| 85% or better | Solid matching, and the score that earns the day; you are reading the direction well |
| Below 85% | You hear the target, but your correction step is coarse |
One day is noisy. Watch the band you land in across a fortnight instead.
Common mistakes
The most common error is overshooting: hearing "go higher", hauling the slider well past the target, and then ping-ponging around it. Halve your correction each time instead. Second, players lock in without auditioning, spending a try on a position they never heard. Third, some work from the Hz number rather than the sound, which trains arithmetic, not hearing. Fourth, octave confusion: a guess an octave off can feel oddly right, yet it scores badly. Finally, tinny laptop speakers thin out the low end and make the bottom of the range harder to judge.
Practice progression
(5 min, beginner) Play the target twice before touching the slider, then aim only to halve your error on every try. (10 min, intermediate) Make your first guess without auditioning it, purely from memory of the target; that guess is the honest measure of your matching. (weekly) Pair Hearkle with Hearecho, which asks you to reproduce a pitch after it has faded, and read the interval ear-training guide.
The science behind it
Matching a pitch is a perception-and-action loop, not a pure listening task: hear a mismatch, adjust, check again. Research on poor-pitch singing found that many people who match badly can still hear the difference perfectly well, which places the difficulty in the correction stage rather than the ear. Our guides on what pitch is and cents cover the units behind the score.
Limitations
Hearkle is a game and an informal self-check, not a clinical or diagnostic tool. Browser audio, headphones and room noise all shift what you hear, so results from different devices are not comparable. One day's score reflects one tone on one machine, not your musical ability. If you suspect a hearing difficulty, see an audiologist rather than a daily puzzle.
Where it shows up
Pitch matching is the quiet skill under a great deal of everyday music-making. A singer joining a choir has to find the note the section is already on, within a beat, without being told where it is. A guitarist tuning by ear does exactly what Hearkle asks: play the target, play your own, decide which way to move, repeat until the beating between them disappears. A violinist places a finger and then slides microscopically to correct, several times a bar, mostly without noticing. Outside music the loop appears whenever you imitate a sound: copying an unfamiliar vowel in a new language, mimicking someone's intonation to check you understood a question. In all of these the useful ability is not noticing that two tones differ; it is turning "slightly too high" into a correction of roughly the right size. That is a motor skill trained by feedback, which is why five tries with a clear direction teach more than one graded attempt. Hearkle will not make anyone a singer, and a game score is a rough gauge, but the loop of hear, adjust, check does respond to practice.
Ready to find today's tone? One hidden pitch, five tries, about a minute, and a new tone tomorrow.
Frequently asked questions
How many tries do I get?
Five. The round also ends early if you land within roughly a tenth of a semitone of the target, which registers as spot on.
Why a percentage instead of a distance in Hz?
Because equal ratios sound equally far apart. The percentage comes from the gap in cents, so 30 cents off scores the same whether the target is low or high.
Does everyone get the same tone?
Yes. One target is generated per day and shared by every player, so results are comparable.
Do I need headphones?
They help low in the range, where small speakers reproduce very little. Any output works, but keep to one if you compare your own days.
Can I practise more than once a day?
Yes. The practice mode on this page gives unlimited rounds, with easier or harder settings and a choice of pitch range.
Related reading & games
- What pitch is and what frequency means: the ideas behind every guess here.
- Heartween asks for the pitch halfway between two tones; Heardrift asks you to hold one steady as it drifts.
- Relative pitch vs. perfect pitch: why matching a tone differs from naming one.
Sources: Pfordresher, P. Q. and Brown, S. (2007), Poor-pitch singing in the absence of "tone deafness", Music Perception 25(2), 95-115; Micheyl, C., Delhommeau, K., Perrot, X. and Oxenham, A. J. (2006), Influence of musical and psychoacoustical training on pitch discrimination, Hearing Research 219(1-2), 36-47.
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