Hearing Threshold Mapper — Find Your Audible Frequency Limits

This tool maps the two edges of your audible range by ear, using nothing but pure sine tones generated with the Web Audio API — acting as a personal audible range finder you can run in any browser without installing anything. There is no microphone and nothing is recorded. For the low edge you start at about 10 Hz and raise the frequency until the tone first becomes a clear, audible pitch — that is your low boundary. For the high edge you start near 20 kHz and lower it until the tone disappears. The slider is logarithmic (each equal step covers a roughly equal musical interval), and an oscillator feeds a gain stage and a stereo panner so the tone can be sent to your left ear, right ear, or both — a simple left/right ear hearing test that takes only a few minutes. Gain is always ramped up and down smoothly to avoid audible clicks, and the default level is deliberately low to protect hearing.

Your marked edges are drawn as a band over the textbook 20 Hz–20 kHz reference, the “ideal young-adult” range. A young, healthy person under laboratory conditions can detect roughly 20 Hz up to 20 kHz (and exceptionally as wide as 12 Hz–28 kHz), but almost nobody hears that full span on everyday consumer equipment. The optional loudness threshold sampler lets you note, at a few fixed frequencies, how much volume you needed before the tone became audible — a rough, uncalibrated sketch of the equal-loudness contour that a clinical audiogram measures properly with calibrated transducers. The optional loudness threshold sampler plots a rough relative threshold curve at fixed frequencies, giving an uncalibrated but useful shape that mirrors what a formal audiogram captures in dB HL.

Why the edges are mostly about your hardware

Two hard limits sit between you and the textbook range, and honesty means stating them plainly. First, your browser’s audio sample rate (typically 44,100 or 48,000 Hz) sets a hard ceiling called the Nyquist limit at half that rate — about 22–24 kHz on this device — and no tone above it can be produced at all. Second, physical transducers roll off at both ends: most headphones and speakers attenuate sharply above ~16–20 kHz and below ~30–40 Hz, and genuine infrasound below 20 Hz is essentially unreproducible on consumer gear — it is felt rather than heard, and even then only at very high levels (an 11 Hz tone, for instance, needs on the order of 95 dB SPL just to reach the threshold of detection). In practice, the low frequency hearing limit you measure here is almost always set by your speakers, while the high frequency hearing limit is a combination of your transducer rolloff and your age. So if your low edge lands around 40–60 Hz, that is your speaker, not your ears; and if you cannot hear above 16 kHz, that is usually a normal mix of age and device rolloff.

What this can and cannot tell you

It can give you a fun, repeatable picture of where your ears plus your gear stop responding, let you compare left against right (an asymmetry — sometimes called an interaural threshold difference — is clinically significant if it exceeds roughly 10 dB at a given frequency), and let you watch the high edge drift over months or years. It cannot give you a calibrated audiogram: a real pure-tone audiogram measures your detection threshold in dB HL (hearing level) at each octave frequency, with calibrated transducers in a sound-treated booth, against published normative data such as ISO 7029. This tool uses uncalibrated tones at whatever volume and on whatever hardware you have. Noise exposure is the primary environmental driver of early hearing loss — if you work in or around loud environments, check your cumulative exposure with the noise exposure calculator. If you notice hearing loss, tinnitus (ringing or buzzing), or a persistent difference between ears, see an audiologist — this is curiosity and entertainment, not a diagnosis.