Tap BPM

A tempo is a reading, not a score: there is no good or bad number. What the page gives you is the speed of the beat you tapped, in beats per minute, and your steadiness, which says how even the gaps between your taps were. A perfectly even tapper would score all of it; a hand never does, and a small shortfall is normal.

For orientation only, the result also sets the beat beside the pace people choose when they tap by themselves, with no music. In an online study of 3,576 people, the middle gap between such taps was 729 ms^[1]. A beat with shorter gaps is quicker than that comfortable pace, a beat with longer gaps slower. It says something about the music, nothing about you.

Read the tempo with care. If you tap on every second beat you will measure half the tempo, and if you tap twice for each beat you will measure double. Musicians know this as half time and double time, and either can be the right answer for the same song. If the number looks odd, try again and tap the beat that you would nod your head to.

Every tap is stamped with the time the browser recorded for it, not with the time the page got round to reading it, so a busy computer does not stretch your gaps. The tempo comes from those stamps alone: nothing is drawn at random and nothing depends on the length of your run. The same taps always give the same tempo.

Steadiness is one minus the variation of the gaps: the spread of the gaps divided by their average. It is kept between nothing and everything. A browser cannot see the small delay between your finger and the screen, but that delay is much the same for every tap, so it hardly changes the gaps, and so it hardly changes your tempo. A touch screen, a mouse and a keyboard can differ in how even they report a tap, which is why we show the device you used.

Your result is saved in this browser and nowhere else: it never goes into a link, and it is never sent to us. You can read about us to see who makes the site.

• Listen first. Tap along in your head for a few bars before you start, so that your first taps are already on the beat.
• Tap with a finger of the hand you use most, and rest the hand so that it moves little.
• Use a keyboard key or a mouse button if a touch screen feels uneven. A key is often the most even of the three.
• Tap for at least a dozen beats. The reading rests on your last taps, so a long run settles on the true tempo.
• Do not look at the number while you tap: it makes your taps follow the number and not the music.

A song has a beat you could count as one, two, three, four, and a faster pulse inside it. You can tap either, and a tap tempo tool will give you the speed of whichever you chose. If a song feels slow to tap but the number comes out high, you probably tapped the quicker pulse. Doubling or halving the number gives you the other reading, and for dance music, running and exercise, people usually quote the one that matches the feel of the step.

If you want to see how fast you can tap rather than how well you can keep a beat, the CPS test counts your taps in a set time.