Brain training: n-back with tones instead of positions. Trains the phonological loop directly.
Audio N-Back replaces visual positions with auditory tones. The phonological loop alone is challenged.
Headphones recommended. Each step plays a tone from a 8-note scale.
Performance is independent of visual N-back - many people are stronger in one modality than the other.
Together with Dual N-Back, this forms the canonical Jaeggi training set.
Auditory working memory loads on different brain circuitry (left temporal, prefrontal) than visual.
Combined audio + visual training produces greater transfer than either alone.
Your ability to hold and update a rolling sequence of sounds without seeing them.
This task isolates auditory-verbal updating: encoding each tone, rehearsing it subvocally, and overwriting the oldest item when a new one arrives. A correct response means you held an ordered acoustic trace across N intervening sounds and compared the current item against the right position in that decaying chain, not merely against a vague sense of familiarity.
Unlike spatial n-back, there is no scene to scan, so you cannot lean on visual landmarks; the load falls on rehearsal and serial order alone. The same machinery supports following a phone number read aloud, tracking who said what in a meeting, or keeping a spoken instruction in mind while you begin acting on it.
Build a stable rehearsal rhythm before you chase higher N.
Start at 1-back until you can run a full block near ceiling, then step to 2-back. Adopt a fixed inner loop: silently name or hum each tone the instant it sounds, and let the syllable for the item N back come up automatically. Only level up after two or three clean blocks; dropping back a level on a bad day is normal, not failure.
The common trap is letting the audio play in the background while your attention drifts; auditory traces fade in seconds, so a missed beat is gone. Resist counting positions on your fingers or mouthing every tone aloud, which jams the phonological loop. Keep ambient noise low, since competing speech and music directly overwrite the rehearsal you depend on.
Read the level you sustain accurately, not your single best lucky block.
Your meaningful figure is the highest N at which you stay reliably above chance with few false alarms, not the peak you once touched. Treat hits and false alarms together: high hits paired with many false alarms usually means you are guessing on familiarity. Track your own moving average across sessions; steady creep in sustained N is the real signal of progress.
Auditory working memory is highly state-dependent: fatigue, caffeine, a noisy room, or a head cold can shift your score more than a week of practice. A strong result here reflects rehearsal under these specific conditions; it does not measure general intelligence, musical pitch ability, or how well you will remember sounds hours later.