A 15-second test
Inner tempo: how fast 3,576 people tap a finger when nothing sets the pace
Asked to tap at a comfortable pace, each person settles on a pace of their own. A 2021 study at the University of Hamburg timed 3,576 people doing just that and published the gaps between their taps. Take the study’s 15-second test and your dot joins theirs.
Tap the circle for 15 seconds at the pace that feels most comfortable and natural right now. Keep the gaps between taps as even as you can.
On a keyboard, press Space.
Who are the 3,576 dots?
Each dot is one person, flashing once per tap at the pace they chose. In 2018 and 2019 a web page of the University of Hamburg asked visitors to tap for 15 seconds on a phone, tablet, keyboard or mouse, at a pace that felt “most comfortable and natural to you right now”.
Visitors were told the test measured how evenly they could tap. What the researchers wanted was the pace each of them picked, which psychologists call spontaneous motor tempo.
How fast do people tap when nothing sets the pace?
Here the same people stand in order of the gap they left between taps: short gaps on the left, long ones on the right. The quickest left 0.12 s, about 8 taps a second. The slowest left 2.15 s.
The middle person left 0.73 s, which is 82 taps a minute.
Your dot appears here once you have tapped. Go to the test
Is there one natural human tempo?
Since the 1970s the reference value has been about 600 milliseconds between taps, or 100 a minute. It goes back to the work of the psychologist Paul Fraisse, who also noted that people differ.
In this sample, 543 of the 3,576 people (15%) tapped with gaps between 500 and 600 ms. Two in three (66%) were slower than 600. The largest of the paper’s six groups, 1,184 people, is centred on 525 ms.
A 2023 review of 107 studies, 13 of which give values for healthy adults, came to the same view: the reference value “is far from being a common value of 600 ms” in healthy adults, and what the studies show is a range.
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Why does the line have several humps?
The line does not rise to one peak. The authors’ statistical model groups the sample into six, and the group averages fall near multiples of a quarter of a second: 265, 525, 754, 997, 1,314 and 1,757 ms.
They write that this “might be indicative” of an internal rhythm of about four beats a second, with people tapping on every second, third or fourth beat, and so on. The paper offers it as a possibility, not as a finding.
The authors add a caution about both ends. Some of the fastest people, at the far left, may have used two fingers or ignored the instructions; some of the slowest may have counted beats in their head and tapped only every other one.
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How even is a steady tap?
Nobody taps like a metronome. Height now shows how much each person’s gaps varied around their own average: almost nothing at the bottom, 10% at the top. Half of the sample stayed under 5.4%; for a gap of 0.7 s that is less than 0.04 s.
The flat upper edge is the test’s own rule. Anyone whose gaps varied by more than 10% was asked to tap again, as many times as it took; people needed 1.6 tries on average.
Among people who passed the 10% rule, pace and evenness have little to do with each other: fast and slow tappers are spread over the same heights.
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Do calm people tap more slowly?
After tapping, everyone answered one question: “How do you feel right now?”, from very calm to very excited. Each column is one answer, with slower tapping higher up; the bar marks the middle person.
And you, right now?
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The middle steps down from column to column: 759 ms among the very calm, then 741, 716, 675, and 647 among the 22 people who said very excited. The columns overlap almost completely, so the answer says little about any one person. The paper found no difference in mood between its six groups, and a small one inside them: people who felt more excited tapped a little faster.
Does the inner tempo slow with age?
Laboratory studies say it does at the two ends of life. Children of five to eight tap about once every 400 ms. For old people, one study gives 700–800 ms and others, at ages 66 to 94, give 1,050–1,125 ms.
Your age?
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This sample stops at 49, and inside it the trend is faint. The middle person taps every 628 ms under 18, 680 at 18–24, 768 at 25–29 and 795 at 30–39, then 706 among the 303 people aged 40–49. Knowing someone’s age tells very little about their pace, though the authors read their own result as confirming that tapping slows with age.
What do another person’s 15 seconds sound like?
Choose any dot to hear the taps that person made, with the gaps from the published file, in their order; the page keeps the first 30 of each person.
Your own pace is not fixed either. The 2023 review names four studies that found an effect of the time of day; in two of them tapping was slower in the morning than in the evening. Tap again tomorrow morning: this device keeps your last result, so you will see both.