Relative pitch test — name the note from a given reference

Because a fixed reference stops being a reference and becomes a memory. Give somebody the same starting note twenty-four times and by the tenth trial they are not measuring an interval from it — they have simply learned what that note sounds like, and from there the task is absolute pitch with worse instructions and an easier answer set. Redrawing the reference forces every trial to be solved from the sound of the pair, which is the only thing this page claims to measure. It also means nothing carries over between trials, so a bad first half cannot poison the second.

It is learnable, and that is the sharpest difference between this page and the absolute pitch one. Interval identification improves steadily with practice at any age, which is precisely why no rank appears beside your score: a percentile here would be a percentile against how long other people have been practicing, and the published figures that exist were gathered on conservatory students, a sample selected for the thing being measured. What the number is good for is comparing you with you, a few weeks apart.

Because the two pages are testing different halves of the same event. Here the question is whether you can identify a relationship between two tones, and hearing them a second time does not answer it for you — if the interval does not resolve into a name, replaying it produces the same shrug. On the melody comparison next door the question is partly whether the first melody survived in memory long enough to be compared against the second, and a replay button would delete the task. Two replays is the cap here rather than none simply so a run cannot stretch indefinitely.

It means the second tone did not separate from the first in memory, and the page counts it separately for that reason. The pattern is common at wide intervals and under fatigue, and it is not carelessness: when two tones are close together in time, the more recent one can overwrite the earlier one, or the earlier one can dominate and be reported as though it were the answer. Watching that count fall across sessions is a more useful signal than watching the total rise, because it tracks a specific failure rather than a general one.

Every tone here is twelve-tone equal temperament, where a semitone is exactly the twelfth root of two, and that is genuinely a compromise rather than the truth. The pure fifth two strings ring on is a 3:2 ratio, which is 702.0 cents; equal temperament shrinks it to 700, so the fifths here are 2.0 cents narrow. The major third is worse: the pure 5:4 is 386.3 cents against the 400 you hear, so it sits nearly 14 cents sharp, which is why an equal-tempered major third beats audibly and a violin section never plays one. Equal temperament is used because every key has to be equally available; the cost is that thirds are the interval a string player will find most wrong.

Because a slow answer means opposite things on the two pages. Over there, taking six seconds means you reconstructed the note from a hummed reference, and reconstruction is exactly what an absolute pitch test has to exclude — so the window is short on purpose. Here, reconstruction is the task: you are meant to identify the distance and count up from the note you were given, and a page that rushed that would report how quickly you do the counting. The only floor left is the pair itself, since nothing arriving before the second tone finishes can be an answer about both.

No, and the pair of results is more informative than either one alone. Scoring well here with nothing on the absolute pitch page is the ordinary profile of a trained musician: you hear relationships accurately and have no fixed internal reference to hang them on. Scoring well on both is the rarer combination. Scoring well there and poorly here would be strange enough to be worth a second run of each, since the task with a reference is the easier of the two by a wide margin.