How to Test Your Hearing Range With a Frequency Generator

The human ear can, in theory, hear frequencies from about 20Hz (a deep rumble) up to 20,000Hz (a thin, high whine) — but almost nobody actually hears the full range, and it narrows with age. Testing where your own range starts and stops takes about two minutes.

Try Frequency Generator

Tone generation, sound tests, and musical tuning in one app.

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What you need

• Good headphones (phone speakers roll off well before 20,000Hz, so they’ll give you a false result)
• A quiet room
• A sweep generator — a tool that smoothly slides from one frequency to another so you can hear exactly where the sound fades out

Step by step

1. Turn your volume down first. High frequencies at high volume can be uncomfortable or briefly cause ringing in your ears — start low and adjust up gradually.
2. Start a sweep from 20Hz upward. Note the point where you first start hearing anything at all — that’s roughly your low-end limit.
3. Run a second sweep from 20,000Hz downward. Note where the sound becomes audible — that’s your high-end limit.
4. Repeat once more to confirm — hearing tests are more reliable as an average of a couple of tries than a single pass.

What affects your result

• Age is the single biggest factor — the high end of human hearing drops steadily through adulthood; many adults top out well below 20,000Hz even with perfect hearing health.
• Headphone quality matters more than most people expect — cheap earbuds often can’t accurately reproduce the extreme ends of the range at all, which will make your test look worse than your hearing actually is.
• Background noise masks low frequencies especially easily — a genuinely quiet room matters.

Beyond a one-time test

Once you know your range, a tone generator app is also useful for tuning instruments against musical note presets, running a proper bass/treble test on new speakers or earbuds, or trying binaural beats (two slightly different tones, one per ear) for relaxation. It’s the same sweep-generation tool underneath all of these — just pointed at a different frequency range each time.