Tap Tempo
Tap the space bar or a button along with the music and read the tempo in beats per minute.
Runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, logged or stored.
Tempo
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You can also press the space bar.
Tap the space bar or the button in time with the music. After four or five taps the tempo settles; keep going and it keeps refining.
How it works
The gap between consecutive taps is a beat, and sixty thousand divided by that gap in milliseconds is the tempo in beats per minute. Averaging several gaps smooths out the unevenness of human tapping.
A plain average would be fooled by a single distracted tap, so gaps that sit far from the middle of the series are dropped before averaging. That is why one late tap no longer ruins the reading, and why stopping and starting again is better than tapping through a mistake.
Frequently asked questions
How many taps do I need?
Two give an answer, four or five give a trustworthy one. The first gap is usually the worst, because the first tap is where you were still finding the beat.
I get half or double the tempo I expected.
You are tapping a different beat: eighth notes instead of quarters, or the bar instead of the beat. Both readings are arithmetically right; halve or double to get the one the track is counted in.
Is anything recorded?
No. The taps are timed in the page and never sent anywhere.
Good to know
- Gaps far from the middle of the series are dropped before averaging, so one distracted tap does not move the figure. It also means a deliberate change of tempo part way through is treated as a mistake rather than followed.
- The taps are timed by your browser against your own hand. Neither is a laboratory instrument, so read the last digit as an indication rather than a measurement.