Tap a tile to hear its tone. Tap two tiles to swap. Order them from lowest to highest pitch.

What Hearsort trains

Hearsort works your pitch ordering: ranking several tones from lowest to highest using nothing but your ears and your memory of what you just heard. Where a two-tone comparison only asks which is higher, ordering five tones asks you to hold a whole set in mind and place each one relative to the others. That mix of comparison and short-term memory is what makes the puzzle harder than it looks on the first tile.

How to play

You are given a row of five tiles, each hiding one tone. Tap a tile to hear it. Tap a second tile and the two swap places. Keep going until the row runs from the lowest pitch on the left to the highest on the right; the puzzle ends the moment the order is correct. There is no time limit and no limit on swaps, so audition any tile as often as you want. Play left to right plays the row in its current order, the quickest way to hear whether the line still dips.

How scoring works

The only number that matters is your swap count against a par of four. Four is what an optimal solver needs in the worst case for five tiles, so finishing at or under par is efficient rather than lucky. There is no penalty for listening: replaying a tile twenty times costs nothing. The cost is purely for moving tiles you did not need to move. When the row is correct, Hear the sorted scale plays the five tones in order.

What your score means

Read the swap count as a band:

Outcome	Rough interpretation
4 swaps or fewer	At par: you placed tiles from a clear mental ranking
5-6 swaps	Good ordering with a little trial and error
7 or more	Sorting by moving rather than by listening first

A high count is not a hearing problem. It usually means you started swapping before hearing all five tones.

Common mistakes

The biggest one is swapping before listening. Audition all five tiles first and you will often see the whole order at once. Second is comparing only neighbours: the tile at the far right may belong at the far left, and adjacent pairs will never tell you that. Third is forgetting what you moved, which happens when several swaps go by without replaying the row. Fourth is chasing the extremes and leaving the middle three, which are closest together and actually decide your count. Finally, a poor speaker can flatten the two lowest tones into something that sounds identical.

Practice progression

(5 min, beginner) Listen to every tile once, in order, before making a single swap. (10 min, intermediate) Finish at par by deciding the whole arrangement in your head first, then executing the swaps without re-auditioning. (weekly) Pair Hearsort with Hearmory, which stretches how many tones you can hold at once, and read musical intervals explained.

The science behind it

Ordering tones leans on two things: how finely you resolve one frequency from another, and how well you keep those comparisons in mind while making the next. Work comparing pitch with other auditory dimensions concluded that what is unusual about pitch is the sheer frequency resolution it supports, not anything special about interval perception. That resolution improves with practice, though training in one frequency region transfers only partly to another. Our guides on frequency in hertz and the octave cover the scale the tiles are drawn from.

Limitations

Hearsort is a game and an informal self-check, not a clinical or diagnostic tool. Browser audio, headphones and room noise change what reaches your ear, so counts from different devices are not comparable. The puzzle uses five well-separated tones from one small range, so a good score says something about ordering there and nothing about music in general. If you have a concern about your hearing, see an audiologist.

Where it shows up

Putting pitches in order is the skill behind reading the shape of a line of music. A singer handed a new part has to know whether the phrase climbs or falls before worrying about which notes it uses. An arranger stacking a chord decides which voice sits at the bottom and which at the top, and gets it wrong the moment the ranking in their head slips. The same ranking runs through everyday listening: you know from a car's engine whether it is climbing through the gears or dropping back, you hear a kettle rise towards the boil, you place a voice on the phone as higher or lower than the one before it without ever assigning a number. A sound designer laying out a family of alert tones ranks them so the urgent one sits clearly above the routine one, and a bell ringer works a whole method from nothing but the order of the strikes. None of that requires naming a pitch. It requires holding several sounds in mind and knowing their order, which is exactly what five tiles and a swap counter make explicit. Hearsort will not teach you to read music, and a low swap count is only a rough gauge, but the ordering itself is the foundation everything melodic is built on.

Ready to line up today's tones? Five tiles, par four swaps, no clock, and a fresh set tomorrow.

Play today's Hearsort ↑

Frequently asked questions

How many tiles are there and what is par?

Five tiles, and par is four swaps. Four is the worst case for an optimal solver with five items, so par is a real benchmark.

Is there a time limit?

No. Nothing is timed and replaying a tile is free. Only swaps are counted.

How do I swap two tiles?

Tap one tile, then another; they exchange places. Tapping the same tile again clears the selection instead of swapping.

Can the puzzle start already sorted?

No. The starting order is reshuffled until it is not the answer, so there is always a swap to make.

Are the tones close together?

They spread across roughly a major sixth, so the extremes are easy. The middle tiles decide your count.

Hearsort

About Hearsort — ordering pitches by ear