High-Frequency Hearing Test: The Mosquito Tone (Play It Now)

The mosquito tone is a very high-pitched sine wave — usually 17.4 kHz — that sits at the edge of human hearing. Teenagers and children hear it clearly. Most adults over 25 don't hear it at all, no matter how loud it's played. It got its name from the Mosquito, a commercial device deployed outside shops in the mid-2000s to disperse loitering teenagers by playing exactly this frequency at high volume.

Physically, there's nothing exotic about 17.4 kHz. It's just a pure tone in the upper region of the 20 Hz–20 kHz range that healthy young ears can pick up. What makes it interesting is that virtually everyone loses sensitivity to this region as they age — the loss is so consistent that a mosquito-tone test doubles as a rough hearing-age indicator.

The reason ties back to how your ear detects sound. The cochlea has a spiral row of tiny hair cells, and the ones tuned to the highest frequencies sit at its base, where they take the most physical stress over a lifetime. They wear out first and, unlike most cells in the body, they don't regenerate.

The interactive player at the top of this page uses the browser's Web Audio API to generate each tone in real time from a mathematical sine wave. There are no downloads and no audio files — the oscillator runs entirely on your device. That matters because pre-recorded MP3s add compression artifacts that can leak lower-frequency energy into the file, letting people "hear" a tone they shouldn't. A live oscillator is a cleaner test.

Start at 8 kHz and work upward, tapping each tone for a second or two. The last frequency where you clearly hear a steady tone (not a click, not a hum from your device) is your practical upper limit. Keep the volume low; if you have to crank the volume to hear it, you're not really hearing it — you're hearing distortion, room resonance, or a harmonic from your speakers.

Age-related loss of high-frequency hearing is called presbycusis. It starts in your late teens and progresses roughly linearly — your upper limit drops by about 1–2 kHz per decade of life. The chart below is a rough population average, not a medical diagnosis. Individual results vary widely depending on genetics, noise exposure history, ear infections, and medications.

Two people the same age can differ by 3–4 kHz. A 22-year-old sound engineer who's stood next to speaker stacks for a decade may already be at the hearing profile of a 40-year-old office worker. That's the more useful takeaway from this test — not "how old are your ears" but "how well have you protected them."

The hair cells in the cochlea aren't distributed evenly. High-frequency cells live at the base of the spiral and are physically closer to the outside world — they take the mechanical brunt of every loud noise you're ever exposed to. Low-frequency cells sit deeper in the cochlea and are naturally shielded.

On top of that, high-frequency cells receive fewer neural connections. When some die (and they do, throughout life), there's less redundancy to mask the loss. This is why hearing loss almost always starts at the top of the range and works down over decades — you don't notice it until it reaches speech frequencies (roughly 2–4 kHz), by which point a lot of damage has already accumulated.

Chronic noise exposure accelerates the process dramatically. A single unprotected concert at 110 dB can measurably shift your hearing threshold overnight; enough of them, and the shift becomes permanent. This is why hearing conservation is a young person's game — the damage compounds silently for years.

This is a screener, not an audiogram. A proper pure-tone audiometry test in an audiologist's booth measures your threshold at each frequency in dB HL (hearing level) under calibrated conditions with medical-grade transducers. What you're doing here is playing tones through consumer headphones in an uncalibrated room — the absolute results are approximate.

The three biggest sources of error, in order: your playback device (most consumer speakers and even many headphones roll off steeply above 15 kHz), background noise in your environment, and the volume you play the tones at. Different devices will give you different "cutoffs" even though your actual hearing hasn't changed. Use the test to compare yourself over time on the same setup, or to compare with someone else using the same headphones.

You can't grow hair cells back, but you can dramatically slow the loss by limiting cumulative noise exposure. NIOSH's safe-exposure guideline is 85 dB for 8 hours, halving the safe time for every 3 dB above that. Concerts, power tools, motorcycles, subway platforms, and personal audio at high volume are the everyday culprits that push people past safe daily doses without them realizing it.

Two practical rules cover most situations. First, if you have to raise your voice to be heard at arm's length, you're probably above 85 dB and need to leave, protect, or lower the volume. Second, for music: the 60/60 rule — no more than 60% of max volume for no more than 60 minutes at a stretch. Cheap foam earplugs give you 20–30 dB of attenuation at concerts and don't muffle music as much as most people fear.