Music quizzes

What each quiz is actually testing

These are not trivia questions with a melody stuck on top. Every question is built from the live catalogue and played by the same synthesiser that powers the rest of the site, so what you hear is the real piece — not a clip, not a recording, but the notes themselves being played to you at that moment.

Name that tune

A melody plays; you pick the piece. This is recognition, the easiest of the ear skills and the one most people already have without knowing it. If you have heard a piece three times in a film you will probably get it, and that is the point: it shows you how much repertoire you have absorbed passively.

Who wrote it?

Harder, and more interesting. You are no longer matching a tune to a name you have heard — you are hearing style. Chopin's left hand moves differently from Bach's. Satie leaves gaps where Liszt would put a flourish. Getting this one right consistently means you have started to hear how composers write, not just what they wrote.

Read the notes

No audio at all: you get the opening letter notes and have to name the piece. This is the quiz that most directly trains the skill the whole site is built on — looking at g g a g c b and hearing it in your head before your hands get there. It is also the fastest way to discover that you know a tune's shape better than its name.

Which is easiest?

Four pieces, one rated easy and three rated hard. Useful in a practical way: it calibrates your sense of what is actually within reach, which is the single most common thing beginners get wrong. Difficulty and fame have very little to do with each other.

Music knowledge

Straight attribution, no audio — which composer wrote a named piece. The most conventional of the five, and a fair test of whether the names on the library shelves have stuck.

Endless mode

All five types mixed, running until you get one wrong. Your best streak is kept on your own device — nothing is uploaded, and there is no account. It is a deliberately unforgiving format: a round of eight lets you shrug off a mistake, an endless run does not, which is exactly what makes the tenth correct answer feel like something.

Why bother training your ear

Letter notes tell you which key to press. They do not tell you whether it sounded right — and that gap is where most self-taught players get stuck. Ear training closes it. Once you can hear a wrong note as wrong, you can correct yourself without a teacher, learn a melody straight from a recording, and eventually work out a tune you have never seen written down at all. Ten minutes of guessing melodies does more for that than an hour of drilling scales.

Every piece that comes up in a quiz is in the library, playable in full. When one catches you out, go and learn it: browse the collection →