Hearing basics
If someone has shown you your hearing chart, you may have seen a banana-shaped outline drawn across the middle of it. That is the speech banana: the area where the sounds of ordinary speech sit. Where your own marks fall against that outline explains a lot about which words you catch and which ones slip past.
A hearing chart, or audiogram, is a graph of the quietest sounds you can hear. Plot where the sounds of speech land on that graph and they fall into a curved band across the middle — dipping low, then rising again at the right-hand end. Someone noticed it looked like a banana, and the name stuck.
Every speech sound has a place inside it. Draw an outline around all of them and you have the region a person needs in order to follow a conversation at an ordinary talking volume.
Two directions, easy to mix up. Left to right is pitch, low to high — a rumbling voice at the left edge, a whistle at the right. Top to bottom is loudness, and it runs upside-down compared to most graphs: the faintest sounds sit at the top, and it gets louder as you go down.
Your marks show the quietest sound you caught at each pitch. Marks above the banana mean the speech sounds at that pitch reach you at a normal talking volume. Marks below it mean those sounds are too quiet for you. One pattern is worth knowing on sight: marks that start near the top on the left and dive under the banana on the right. That shape means voices come through but the soft, high consonants drop out — s, f, th — which is the chart’s version of “I can hear you, but I can’t make out the words.”
Left to right: pitch, low to high
Top to bottom: loudness, quietest at the top
Above the banana: those speech sounds reach you
Below the banana: those sounds are too quiet for you
The speech banana is the area on a hearing chart where the sounds of speech sit. It is named for its shape.
The left side of the banana holds the vowels and sounds like m, n and ng. These are low-pitched and they hold most of the power in speech — they are what makes a voice sound loud from across a room.
The right side holds the soft, high sounds: s, f, th, sh, t, k and p. They are far quieter, and they are the ones that separate similar words. "Sap" and "sat", "fee" and "see", "cat" and "cap" differ only in that one faint sound at the end.
This is the most common pattern, and it explains a complaint that sounds like a contradiction: people are loud enough, but you cannot make out what they are saying. If your marks drop below the banana on the right, the vowels still arrive at full strength while the soft high sounds do not. You hear that someone is speaking. The parts that tell "sat" from "sap" never reach you.
Hearing aids and cochlear implants are set up to bring those sounds back into range. That helps, and it is also why the first weeks can feel strange — sounds you have not heard clearly in years take a while to sort out once they return.
Hear it
The top right of the banana, taken away
The same recording at the same loudness, twice. The second pass drops the soft, high sounds — the right-hand end of the banana.
Same recording both times. Only the high, quiet sounds change.
Searching for the speech banana also turns up an app called Speech Banana, and the two are easy to confuse. The app is a listening practice tool from Johns Hopkins University, built for people learning to hear with a cochlear implant or a hearing aid. It runs on iPad and in a web browser, in English and in Korean, and it is free.
It has been quiet for a while — the English iPad version was last updated in March 2021 and the Korean one in November 2024 — but the website, both iPad apps and both web versions were all working when we checked on August 12, 2026. If you were told about it and assumed it had disappeared, it has not.
FAQ
The speech banana is the banana-shaped area on a hearing chart where the sounds of speech sit. Low-pitched sounds fall on the left, high-pitched sounds on the right, and the outline drawn around all of them makes the curved shape the name comes from.
It means some speech sounds are too quiet for you to hear at a normal talking level. Which ones depends on where your marks fall. Most often it is the right-hand side, so soft high sounds like s, f and th go missing while vowels still come through.
All the sounds of ordinary speech. Vowels and sounds like m, n and ng sit low on the left, where speech holds most of its power. The softer, higher sounds — s, f, th, sh, t, k and p — sit on the right.
Usually because the low sounds still reach you and the high ones do not. Vowels hold the loudness, so speech sounds loud enough, while the soft high sounds that separate similar words fall below what you can hear.
Both, confusingly. The speech banana on a hearing chart is a way of reading an audiogram. Speech Banana is also the name of a free listening practice app from Johns Hopkins that runs on iPad and on the web, in English and Korean.
Yes. We checked on August 12, 2026: the website, both iPad apps and both web versions were working. The English iPad app was last updated in March 2021 and the Korean one in November 2024.
Related reading
SoundSteps is built around word pairs that differ by one soft sound — "sat" and "sap", "fee" and "see". Start with the free listening check in your browser, no card.
