Animal Ears 🐁 How animals hear
Mouse hearing range in hertz
Mus musculus
It lives one floor above you: nearly deaf to your voice, razor-sharp in ultrasound.
In short
A Mouse hears from about 2.3 kHz up to 85.5 kHz, and the pitch it catches best is near 16 kHz. Animal Ears lets you take any sound of yours and hear it exactly as it would.
A mouse lives in a high-pitched world that barely overlaps with yours. Below 2,300 Hz it hears almost nothing, so much of your voice reaches it blurred or not at all. It climbs instead to 85,500 Hz, four times your ceiling, and peaks near 16,000 Hz. Everything that sounds like silence to you in a kitchen at night — scratches, squeaks, whole conversations between mice — is street noise to it.
Hertz (Hz)
Which pitches it hears
Hertz count how many times per second a sound vibrates. Few vibrations = low (the rumble of thunder, about 30 Hz). Many vibrations = high (a microwave beeping, about 3,000 Hz). And ‘1 kHz' is just shorthand for 1,000 Hz. You hear, roughly, from 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz.
A low sound rumbles (think thunder); a high sound squeals (think a mosquito). These three numbers mark how far down this animal goes, how far up it goes, and which pitch it hears most clearly of all.
| Lowest it hears | 2.3 kHz |
|---|---|
| Highest it hears | 85.5 kHz |
| Hears most clearly | 16 kHz |
| What you hear | 20 Hz – 20 kHz |
Your ears vs a Mouse's
Yes: it picks up pitches so high they are pure silence to you, up to about 85.5 kHz. Your ceiling is 20 kHz.
Audiogram
| Hertz (Hz) | Hearing threshold |
|---|---|
| 1 kHz | 76 dB |
| 2.3 kHz | 60 dB |
| 4 kHz | 40 dB |
| 8 kHz | 18 dB |
| 12 kHz | 6 dB |
| 16 kHz | -2 dB |
| 24 kHz | 10 dB |
| 32 kHz | 20 dB |
| 45 kHz | 30 dB |
| 64 kHz | 42 dB |
| 85.5 kHz | 60 dB |
| 90 kHz | 70 dB |
Digitised from published behavioural curves; 60 dB SPL 50%-detection, best ~16 kHz. No useful hearing below ~2 kHz.
Can a Mouse hear things you can't?
A Mouse picks up everything from 2.3 kHz (the deepest) to 85.5 kHz (the highest), and hears best around 16 kHz.
Yes: it picks up pitches so high they are pure silence to you, up to about 85.5 kHz. Your ceiling is 20 kHz.
Frequently asked questions
What sounds can a Mouse hear?
A Mouse picks up everything from 2.3 kHz (the deepest) to 85.5 kHz (the highest), and hears best around 16 kHz.
Can a Mouse hear things you can't?
Yes: it picks up pitches so high they are pure silence to you, up to about 85.5 kHz. Your ceiling is 20 kHz.
How does Animal Ears make a sound like a Mouse would hear it?
Scientists have measured, pitch by pitch, the quietest volume at which a Mouse starts to hear each sound. We take that curve and apply it to your recording like a giant equaliser: we turn up the pitches the animal hears beautifully and turn down or remove the ones that simply don't exist for it. The result gets close to what it would notice... but it still arrives through your ears.
Hertz (Hz)
Hertz count how many times per second a sound vibrates. Few vibrations = low (the rumble of thunder, about 30 Hz). Many vibrations = high (a microwave beeping, about 3,000 Hz). And ‘1 kHz' is just shorthand for 1,000 Hz. You hear, roughly, from 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz.
Ultrasound
Sounds so high your ears no longer register them: above about 20,000 Hz. To you they are total silence, but a dog, a cat or a bat hears them perfectly. That's exactly where a ‘silent' dog whistle lives.
Where these numbers come from
- Heffner, H. & Masterton, B. (1980). Hearing in glires. J. Acoust. Soc. Am., 68, 1584–1599. doi:10.1121/1.385213
- Koay, G., Heffner, R.S. & Heffner, H.E. (2002). Behavioral audiograms of med(J) mice. Hearing Research, 171, 111–118. doi:10.1016/S0378-5955(02)00492-6
More animals
Bat
It hunts in the dark by reading the echo of its own shouts, five times above your ceiling.
Cat
It reaches nearly four times higher than you: it hears mice talking on a private channel.
Tiger
A house cat's ears scaled up, plus a roar you feel before you hear it.
Ferret
It hunts in pitch-dark tunnels, guided by its prey's high-pitched squeaks.
Animal Ears
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