Hear the gap, then echo it.

How Echo works

Two beats play, separated by a gap of between one and four seconds. Then you tap twice to reproduce that gap. Nothing is shown, nothing is counted; you're copying a duration you heard a moment ago. Five rounds make a run.

Echo is the hardest of the five to be consistent at, because it stacks two error sources. You have to perceive the gap accurately andreproduce it accurately, and the two mistakes don't cancel out. It is also the mode where sound matters most, since the thing you're copying is a sound in the first place.

What a good score looks like

Scores here run a little lower than in Guess for the same effort, and that's expected rather than a sign you're bad at it. Inside 10 per cent is a good round. What separates strong players is not their best round but their spread: five rounds within a narrow band beats two brilliant rounds and three wild ones.

Three ways to get better

• Copy the shape, don't measure it. For gaps this short, converting to a number and back adds two conversions and two chances to be wrong. Hold the gap as a single gesture and play it back.
• Be deliberate about the first tap. Rushing it is the most common way to lose a round. Your gap starts when you decide it does, so start it on purpose rather than as soon as the prompt appears.
• Play with sound on. Auditory intervals are timed more precisely than visual ones, which is not a preference but a fairly consistent finding. Muting the game makes this mode harder than it needs to be.

The common mistake

Listening passively to the reference gap. The listening phase isn't dead time, it's the only chance you get to encode the thing you're about to reproduce. Attend to the gap while it happens and the reproduction takes care of most of itself, because attention is the variable that decides how long an interval registers as in the first place.

The other four modes

Temvo is five disciplines, and “a sense of time” turns out not to be one skill. Most people are markedly better at some of these than others.

• GuessWatch a hidden timer, then say how long it ran.
• HitStart the clock and stop it dead on a target time.
• TempoLock onto a beat, then hold it after it goes silent.
• 9.99Stop the timer on 9.99, with the last seconds blurred out.

Or play all five in one run as today's daily challenge, where everyone gets the same rounds and you get a single shot at them.