Hearmory
Hear the sequence, then tap it back. It grows by one each round.
About Hearmory — training your tone memory
Hearmory trains auditory working memory — holding a run of pitches in your head and playing it back in order. It is the memory a musician leans on to learn a melody by ear, to echo a phrase back to a bandmate, or to keep a tune in mind long enough to write it down.
Listen to the sequence, then tap it back on the pads. Each round it grows by one tone, stretching how much your ear can hold at once.
Pitch memory grows with use, not just talent. Our guide to tone-memory training covers how the ear stores and recalls pitch, and how to build a longer span. Explore the rest of our ear-training guides for more.
What Hearmory trains
Hearmory works your auditory working memory: holding a run of pitches in your head accurately enough to play it back in the right order. It is not a discrimination task. The tones are far enough apart that telling them apart is easy, and the whole difficulty lives in retention. Every round adds one more tone, so the puzzle keeps pushing until it finds the point where your span runs out.
How to play
Press Start. Six colored pads sit below the status line, each carrying its own tone from a pentatonic set. The game flashes and sounds the sequence, then hands the pads to you and you tap it back from the beginning. Round one is a single tone; every round you clear adds one more. There is no time limit on your taps, but no margin for error either: one wrong pad ends the run. When that happens the pad you should have pressed is highlighted and replayed on its own, so you finish knowing what you missed.
How scoring works
Your score is the length you reached, meaning the longest sequence you reproduced correctly from start to finish. Failing on the fifth tone of a five-tone round leaves you on four, because four is what you actually completed. Nothing rewards speed and nothing rewards partial recall; only completed rounds count. The sequence is generated once per day and shared by everyone, so the run you failed on is the same run everyone else faced. A length of four or more earns the day towards your streak.
What your score means
Read the length as a band rather than a capacity measurement:
| Outcome | Rough interpretation |
|---|---|
| A long run, well past four | A strong span, and almost certainly grouped rather than recalled tone by tone |
| Length 4 or more | Earns the day, and the usual region for an untrained listener on a fresh sequence |
| Length below 4 | Usually attention or interference, not span; try again somewhere quiet |
Span varies a lot day to day. Tiredness and background noise move it more than practice does over a single week.
Common mistakes
The first mistake is watching the colors instead of listening. Color is a convenience, and a memory built on it collapses as soon as the sequence gets long. Second is tapping immediately, before the sequence has settled; a half-second pause costs nothing. Third is naming the pads as numbers, which turns a tune into a digit list and throws away the contour that made it memorable. Fourth is humming along out loud, which sounds helpful but adds interference of exactly the kind pitch memory is most vulnerable to.
Practice progression
(5 min, beginner) Play with your eyes half-closed and try to hear the sequence as a short tune rather than a list of pads. (10 min, intermediate) Deliberately group the sequence in threes as it grows, and rehearse the group boundaries rather than every tone. (weekly) Pair Hearmory with Hearecho, which tests how faithfully a single pitch survives a pause, and read the tone-memory training guide for what actually moves a span.
The science behind it
Memory for pitch behaves differently from memory for words or digits. A classic experiment showed that recalling a tone is badly disrupted by other tones heard in the gap, but barely disrupted by spoken numbers in the same gap, pointing to a store specific to pitch rather than a general one. That is why humming along interferes so much, and why grouping helps: chunking moves part of the load out of the fragile pitch store and into structure. Our guide to tone memory and the wider ear-training guides go further.
Limitations
Hearmory is a game and an informal self-check, not a clinical or diagnostic tool. It measures one span on one day with one sequence, under whatever distraction happens to be around you. A short run is not evidence of a memory problem, and a long one is not evidence of talent. If you are worried about memory or hearing, talk to a clinician rather than a daily puzzle.
Where it shows up
Holding a run of pitches is the working memory a musician uses constantly. Learning a tune by ear means hearing a phrase, keeping it intact while you find the first note, and getting to the end before it fades. Playing in a band means echoing back the riff someone just showed you, once, over noise. A singer taking a harmony keeps their own line in mind while a different one plays underneath, the same store doing two jobs. The skill reaches outside music: holding on to how a word sounded in a language you do not speak yet, or remembering an alarm's pattern well enough to describe it later. A sound engineer comparing two takes carries the first one in mind while the second plays, and knows the comparison is only good for a few seconds. A speech therapist repeating a child's mispronounced word back to them has to hold the contour exactly as it was said, not as it should have been. All of these depend on a store that fades quickly and is easily overwritten by similar material, which is why a sequence you were sure of collapses the moment someone speaks, or the moment you hum it to yourself in the wrong key. It also explains why the fix is structural rather than muscular: nobody lengthens this store by trying harder, but almost everyone gains a tone or two by hearing the sequence as two short phrases instead of one long list, exactly as a phone number is easier in blocks. Hearmory makes that boundary visible by walking up to it one tone at a time, and shows you which of the two strategies you were using the moment the run ends.
Ready to see how far your span goes? One sequence, one tone longer each round, about a minute, and a new run tomorrow.
Frequently asked questions
How long can the sequence get?
It grows by one tone per cleared round. Reaching the very end is far beyond a normal span, so in practice the run ends where your memory does.
What happens when I tap the wrong pad?
The run ends there. The correct pad is highlighted and its tone replayed on its own, then you go to the result screen.
Do I have to tap quickly?
No. Nothing is timed once the sequence has played, so take as long as you need before each tap.
Why do the pads sound pleasant together?
The six pads use a pentatonic set, so any order sounds musical. That is deliberate: an unpleasant sequence is harder to remember for reasons unrelated to span.
Does everyone get the same sequence?
Yes. One sequence is generated per day and shared by all players, so lengths are comparable.
Related reading & games
- Tone-memory training: how pitch is stored, and what actually lengthens a span.
- Hearecho holds one pitch across a pause; Hearsort asks you to rank several at once.
- What pitch is, for the perception underneath everything the pads do.
Source: Deutsch, D. (1970), Tones and numbers: specificity of interference in immediate memory, Science 168(3939), 1604-1605.
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