Lock onto the beat, then hold it.

How Tempo works

A beat plays a few times to establish a pace, somewhere around one beat per second, then falls silent. Your job is to keep it going, blind, for the rest of the sequence. The score isn't about where you finish. It's about how even your gaps are, so a steady wrong tempo beats an erratic right one.

This is the continuation task from the rhythm literature, and it is a genuinely different skill from the other four modes. Tapping along to a beat you can hear is easy, because every beat corrects you. Holding it after the sound stops removes the correction and leaves your errors to pile up.

What a good score looks like

Consistency is everything. A run where every gap is within a few per cent of the reference will score well even if you sit slightly fast or slightly slow throughout. Musicians tend to arrive with an advantage here, which is the one place in Temvo where prior training visibly shows up.

Three ways to get better

• Use the audible beats to encode, not to perform. Your entire silent stretch is built on the period you captured. A sloppy lock-in cannot be rescued later.
• Attach it to your body. A nod, a foot, a breath: rhythm holds far better when a movement carries it than when you keep it in your head. Just use the same movement every time.
• Subdivide if the beat feels slow.Around one beat a second is below most people's natural tapping rate, and slow beats are where rhythm degrades into individual interval guesses. Feeling two pulses inside each gap keeps the rhythm mechanism doing the work.

The common mistake

Correcting mid-sequence. With no reference to check against, you cannot actually tell whether you're drifting, so every “fix” is a guess that adds jitter, and jitter is precisely what the mode scores. Set the tempo, then defend it. The science of keeping a beat covers why unaccompanied tapping drifts, and why it usually drifts fast.

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.
• EchoHear an interval, then reproduce it.
• 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.