We’ve covered a lot of different material in the Bass Tone series: after 9 articles and 6 podcast episodes, it’s about time to stop and check whether your ears have kept up! We’ve had a few quizzes along the way, but this week it’s time to add a final test on bass effects, and re-check your knowledge on the previous three topics.

The first quiz is all about the sounds of the fretless, introduced in “The Upright Bass” and “Fretless Electric”. You’ll need to distinguish between fretted, upright and fretless electric bass guitar sounds to succeed:

Next up we’ll take a listen to different playing techniques, as introduced in Playing Techniques, Part 1 and Part 2, and the corresponding podcast episode. Do you remember all about slaps, pops, slides, pull-offs, and hammer-ons? Time to find out!

Click to read the rest…

We’ve been cooking up a special treat for you this Halloween!

Think you know your spooky tunes? Test your ears with this Halloween-edition music identification quiz!

There are 10 questions to test you on 11 different haunting melodies – a different selection every time! At the end you’ll have a chance to review any you got wrong.

On a mobile device? Open in a new window

Now don’t forget to let us know your score in the comments below!

Those of you who are regular readers of The Oatmeal will have noticed a recent feature: The Teenager Audio Test, otherwise known as “the Mosquito,” a mysterious sound that only youngsters can hear.

We at Easy Ear Training love anything that gets people thinking about exploring their ears, but this page left a lot to be desired. The Oatmeal explained nothing about what the Mosquito tone really is, why only some people can hear it, the damage it might do you, and why—when you click on the link—you may not even be hearing the real Mosquito sound.

The Oatmeal is not alone in producing poor-quality features on the Mosquito; even some prestigious broadcasters have been guilty of the same thing. In this article, I’m going to bust five myths about the Mosquito, and expose some of the basic mistakes the press make when talking about it.

Myth 1 – The Mosquito is complex and high-tech

There’s nothing very complicated about the Mosquito sound. In fact it’s the most basic sound there is: a sine wave, which looks like this:


The Mosquito: A 15kHz Sine Wave (viewed in Audacity)

If we analyze the sample provided by The Oatmeal, then we can see that the wave goes up and down fifteen thousand times a second, meaning it has a frequency of 15,000 Hertz (15kHz in shorthand). To put that into perspective, the highest note on a full-size piano is around 4kHz, and frequency doubles for each octave you go up, so you can see that the Mosquito is about two octaves above the highest note that a piano can produce!

[If you want to know more about audio frequencies and the limits of human hearing, try our Frequency Fundamentals series.]

On to our next myth…
Click to read the rest…