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What are the bandwidths of hearing for other animals?
Hearing
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How a person hears him or herself is unique to that person. When you speak, you hear yourself through sound waves propagating through your body, in addition to the waves propagating through the air. To make a sound, a person vibrates his vocal chords, which vibrate the tissues around the vocal chords. These tissues include muscle, bone, and cartilage. Waves travel through these media at varying speeds and create slightly different sounds when they are transmitted through the skull to the inner ear. Thus, our voices on a recording sound different to us because we are hearing them without the special characteristics they pick up when transferred directly through the skull.
The lower and upper fringes of this bandwidth can be difficult to hear, but many people—especially younger people—can hear these frequencies quite well. As people age their sensitivity to high frequencies diminishes. Damage to the hair cells caused by exposure to loud sounds also reduces the ear’s sensitivity to high frequencies.
| Animal | Lowest Frequency | Highest Frequency |
| Human | 20 Hz | 20,000 Hz |
| Dog | 20 Hz | 40,000 Hz |
| Cat | 80 Hz | 60,000 Hz |
| Bat | 10 Hz | 110,000 Hz |
| Dolphin | 110 Hz | 130,000 Hz |