What Hearshort trains

Hearshort works your pitch discrimination under time pressure: deciding which of two tones is higher, over and over, against a clock. The judgement itself is the simplest in ear training. What makes it a different skill is having to make it in under a second and then do it again, with no time to deliberate. Real listening works this way: a wrong note has to be caught as it goes past, not afterwards.

How to play

Press Start and you have thirty seconds. Two tones play in sequence with a short gap. Tap 1st higher or 2nd higher, and the next pair begins immediately. Replay both plays the current pair again if you missed it, but the clock keeps running. A wrong answer takes a second and a half off the timer and moves you straight on to the next pair, so a miss costs you time and the point you did not earn, which makes guessing to save time a losing trade. The run holds far more pairs than anyone reaches in half a minute, so the clock always stops you first.

How scoring works

Your score is the number of correct answers before time runs out, and the result screen also shows your accuracy as a percentage of the pairs you attempted. The two say different things: score rewards throughput, accuracy tells you whether the throughput was real. A score of 10 or more earns the day towards your streak. The tones in each pair sit between about a fifth and half a semitone apart, comfortably audible when you are calm and hard when you are rushing. The run is generated once per day and shared by everyone.

What your score means

Read the pair of numbers together:

Outcome	Rough interpretation
Score 10 or more, high accuracy	Fast and genuinely accurate, and 10 is the score that earns the day
Score 10 or more, low accuracy	You are answering by volume; the time penalty is eating the clock
Under 10, high accuracy	Careful and correct; work on committing sooner

Accuracy near fifty per cent means the answers were effectively coin flips, whatever the score says.

Common mistakes

The biggest one is answering before the second tone finishes. There is nothing to decide until you have heard both, and waiting costs almost nothing. Second is panic-tapping after a miss, which is how one wrong answer turns into three. Third is overusing replay: it is there for a pair you genuinely missed, and the clock does not pause for it. Fourth is listening for loudness, since a tone can jump out without being the higher one. Finally, small speakers flatten the low pairs and a noisy room removes the fine ones entirely.

Practice progression

(5 min, beginner) Ignore the score and aim for perfect accuracy, however few pairs you get through. (10 min, intermediate) Set a rule of answering within one beat of the second tone ending, and accept the misses that come with it. (weekly) Follow Hearshort with Hearddle, which removes the clock and shrinks the differences instead, so you train resolution and speed separately.

The science behind it

The underlying ability is frequency discrimination, and it responds to training. In one comparison, non-musicians' pitch discrimination thresholds were more than six times larger than classical musicians', and still around four times larger after two hours of practice, while the musicians barely improved. The gains are also narrower than most people assume: perceptual learning in a frequency discrimination task is largely specific to the region trained, so practising one part of the range does not automatically move your threshold elsewhere. Our guide to how small a difference you can hear covers those limits.

Limitations

Hearshort is a game and an informal self-check, not a clinical or diagnostic tool. It mixes hearing with reaction time, device latency and how awake you are, so a low score has several causes that have nothing to do with your ears. Results across devices are not comparable, and thirty seconds is a small sample. If you are concerned about your hearing, see an audiologist.

Where it shows up

Fast pitch decisions are what listening consists of once music is moving. A conductor hears a wind section enter slightly sharp and has to know it in the same bar, because four bars later the moment to fix it has gone. A session player following an unfamiliar chart hears whether the line just went up or down and commits their hand before the thought finishes. A sound engineer sweeping a filter hears the resonance move and stops on it, with nothing to replay. Away from music the same speed is at work more often than it seems: you hear a car and know from the rising pitch that it is coming towards you, you catch that a machine is spinning up rather than down, you register from one syllable that a question was asked. An anaesthetist tracking a monitor's tone across a long procedure, or a train driver hearing a warning chime change while doing three other things, works under the same constraint. None of those judgements is difficult in isolation. All of them are useless if they arrive late. Hearshort trains the second half of that: not whether you can tell two tones apart, but whether you can tell them apart in the time you actually get.

Ready to start the clock? Thirty seconds, as many pairs as you can take, and a fresh run tomorrow.

Play today's Hearshort ↑

Frequently asked questions

How long is a run?

Thirty seconds. The timer starts when you press Start and does not pause, including while you use Replay both.

Do wrong answers subtract from my score?

Not directly. Your score is the count of pairs you called correctly, and it never goes down. A miss takes a second and a half off the clock and moves you on to the next pair, so mistakes cost you time and the point you did not win, which is enough to make guessing worse than waiting to be sure.

Should I chase the score or the accuracy?

Accuracy first. A high score with poor accuracy usually means the time penalty has quietly cancelled out the extra answers.

How far apart are the two tones?

Roughly a fifth to half of a semitone. That is clearly audible without pressure and much less obvious at speed.

Does everyone get the same pairs?

Yes. One run is generated per day and served to every player in the same order, so the head-to-head comparison is fair.

Hearshort

About Hearshort — fast pitch decisions