Human Hearing Boundary Mapper
Map your personal hearing boundaries at both ends. Raise a low tone from 10 Hz until it first becomes audible, lower a high tone from 20 kHz until it disappears, and see your map drawn over the textbook 20 Hz–20 kHz band. Test each ear, compare with age norms, and save your map to track changes over time.
🔊 Use headphones at a low volume (essential for per-ear testing) and start quiet. This is a basic self-test for curiosity, not a clinical audiogram or medical test. The low edge is almost always limited by your speakers (most cannot reproduce below ~30–40 Hz; true infrasound below 20 Hz is felt, not heard, and needs a capable subwoofer at very high level). The high edge is limited by gear that rolls off above ~16–20 kHz, by your browser’s sample rate (nothing above the Nyquist limit can be produced at all), and by volume and ambient noise. For any real concern about your hearing, see an audiologist.
1. Calibrate volume
Pick which ear to test, then play the 1 kHz reference tone and set the volume so it is comfortably soft — clearly audible but never loud. Use the same level for the whole map so your two edges are comparable. Never crank a tone you cannot hear.
2. Find an edge
3. Your hearing map
Your marked edges are drawn as a green band over the textbook 20 Hz–20 kHz range. Edges are stored only in your own browser so you can compare next time.
A basic self-test for curiosity — not a clinical audiogram.
Loudness threshold sampler approximation
Optional. For each frequency, lower the volume until the tone just disappears and mark it. This sketches a rough threshold curve in the style of an audiogram. It is not calibrated: the values are relative slider positions on your own gear, not dB SPL, and cannot be compared between devices or to a clinical chart.
Typical Upper Hearing Limit by Age
These are widely-published population averages for healthy ears. The gradual loss of high-frequency hearing with age is called presbycusis; its statistical trend is described in ISO 7029:2017 (which models thresholds for ages 18–80 and extended high frequencies to 12.5 kHz). Studies of normal adults find people under ~30 typically respond well to 16 kHz, with sensitivity falling each decade. Treat the table as a rough guide — individuals vary a lot with genetics, noise exposure, volume and hardware.
The low end is not in this table because it tracks your equipment far more than your age — most people lose the low tones to their speakers, not their ears.
How It Works
This tool maps the two edges of your audible range by ear, using nothing but pure sine tones generated with the Web Audio API. 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 is 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. Gain is always ramped up and down to avoid clicks, and the default level is deliberately low.
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 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 curve a clinical audiogram measures properly.
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). 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, and let you watch the high edge drift over months. It cannot give you a calibrated audiogram: a real test measures your detection threshold in dB HL at each frequency, with calibrated transducers in a sound-treated booth, against published norms such as ISO 7029. This tool uses uncalibrated tones at whatever volume and on whatever hardware you have. If you notice hearing loss, ringing, or a difference between your ears that worries you, see an audiologist — this is curiosity and entertainment, not a diagnosis.