Need a clean test tone to check your speakers, tune an instrument, or find out how far your hearing actually reaches? This tone generator plays pure sine, square, triangle, and sawtooth waves at any frequency between 20 Hz and 20 kHz, right in your browser.

Pick a waveform, drag the frequency slider or type an exact value, and hit play. When you need the tone outside the browser, render it straight to a WAV file.

Why people use this tool

• Test speakers and headphones properly: sweep through the full audible range to catch dead spots, buzzing, or a driver that quietly drops out at certain frequencies.
• Tune instruments by ear: dial in 440 Hz for concert pitch A, or any other reference frequency, and the nearest musical note updates live so you always know exactly what you’re hearing.
• Get a rough sense of your hearing range: play through 20 Hz to 20 kHz to notice where your own hearing starts to fade at the top end, similar to the simple sweep tests used in basic hearing checks.
• Download the exact tone you dialed in: render 5 to 60 seconds of your current settings straight to a WAV file, no recording software needed.
• See the waveform, not just hear it: a live oscilloscope traces the shape of whatever’s playing, which makes it obvious what “square” or “sawtooth” actually looks like compared to a sine wave.

Choosing the right waveform

A sine wave is the purest tone there is: a single frequency with no extra harmonics riding along. That makes it the standard choice for tuning instruments, testing speaker response, or checking your own hearing, since there’s nothing else in the signal to confuse the result.

Square, triangle, and sawtooth waves all contain the same fundamental frequency plus a stack of harmonics above it, just built up differently. A square wave is harsh and buzzy, useful for stress-testing an amplifier or spotting distortion that a gentler sine wave would hide. A triangle wave sits in between, softer than a square but with more character than a sine. A sawtooth is the brightest of the three and shows up constantly in synth basses and leads, since its full set of harmonics gives it that raspy, cutting edge.

Switching waveforms while a tone is already playing updates the sound immediately, so it’s easy to compare how the same frequency feels across all four shapes.

Reading frequency and the nearest musical note

The frequency slider covers the full range most people can hear, from a felt-more-than-heard 20 Hz rumble up to a 20 kHz tone that many adults can no longer perceive at all. Because that range spans three orders of magnitude, the slider moves on a logarithmic scale: each step feels proportional whether you’re near the bass end or picking between 15 kHz and 16 kHz.

Type an exact value into the frequency field, or grab one of the quick presets, including 440 Hz for concert pitch A, the reference nearly every instrument in Western music tunes against. Whatever frequency you land on, the tool works out the closest musical note and shows how many cents sharp or flat you are from it, so you can tell at a glance whether you’ve landed on A4 exactly or drifted toward A#4.

Downloading your tone as a WAV file

Sometimes you need the tone outside the browser tab: as a test file for other software, a reference clip to send someone, or a ringtone. Pick a duration from 5 to 60 seconds, hit download, and the tool renders your current waveform, frequency, volume, and pan settings offline into a standard 16-bit WAV file, with a short fade at the start and end so there’s no click when it starts or stops.

The rendered file matches whatever you hear when you press play, so dial in the settings first, confirm it sounds right, and then download it.

A note on volume and hearing safety

Pure tones often sound louder than music or speech at the same volume level, since all the energy sits at one frequency instead of being spread across a range. Start at a low volume and increase it gradually, especially before testing anything near the top or bottom of the frequency range. High volumes at any frequency can damage speakers or headphones over time, and sustained loud tones are a real risk to your hearing.

If you’re using this tool to get a general sense of your hearing range, treat it as a casual check, not a diagnosis. A proper hearing test from an audiologist accounts for calibrated equipment and controlled conditions that a browser and a random pair of headphones simply can’t replicate.

If you’re after audible signalling rather than a steady test tone, the Morse Code Translator encodes text into the dots and dashes it plays back as timed beeps.