Animal Ears 🕊️ How animals hear
Pigeon hearing range in hertz
Columba livia
Its superpower sits below your hearing: it catches the rumble of distant storms.
In short
A Pigeon hears from about 40 Hz up to 8.5 kHz, and the pitch it catches best is near 1 kHz. Animal Ears lets you take any sound of yours and hear it exactly as it would.
In ordinary terms, a pigeon hears worse than you: 40 to 8,500 Hz, so it misses all of your highs. Its talent is in the basement. It detects incredibly deep infrasound, far below your limit, which is the planet's background rumble: storms hundreds of kilometres away, waves breaking on a coast, wind pouring over a mountain range. That ‘map of sound' is thought to help it find its way home.
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 | 40 Hz |
|---|---|
| Highest it hears | 8.5 kHz |
| Hears most clearly | 1 kHz |
| What you hear | 20 Hz – 20 kHz |
Your ears vs a Pigeon's
It does miss the highs you can hear, though: above about 8.5 kHz there is nothing left for it.
Audiogram
| Hertz (Hz) | Hearing threshold |
|---|---|
| 10 Hz | 50 dB |
| 50 Hz | 35 dB |
| 100 Hz | 28 dB |
| 250 Hz | 18 dB |
| 500 Hz | 9 dB |
| 1 kHz | 3 dB |
| 2 kHz | 6 dB |
| 4 kHz | 22 dB |
| 6 kHz | 36 dB |
| 8 kHz | 50 dB |
Best ~1–2 kHz; pigeons are exceptionally sensitive to infrasound (documented to ~0.05 Hz), so the modelled low-frequency floor is a conservative behavioural approximation.
Can a Pigeon hear things you can't?
A Pigeon picks up everything from 40 Hz (the deepest) to 8.5 kHz (the highest), and hears best around 1 kHz.
It does miss the highs you can hear, though: above about 8.5 kHz there is nothing left for it.
Frequently asked questions
What sounds can a Pigeon hear?
A Pigeon picks up everything from 40 Hz (the deepest) to 8.5 kHz (the highest), and hears best around 1 kHz.
Can a Pigeon hear things you can't?
It does miss the highs you can hear, though: above about 8.5 kHz there is nothing left for it.
How does Animal Ears make a sound like a Pigeon would hear it?
Scientists have measured, pitch by pitch, the quietest volume at which a Pigeon 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.
Where these numbers come from
- Kreithen, M.L. & Quine, D.B. (1979). Infrasound detection by the homing pigeon. J. Comp. Physiol. A, 129, 1–4. doi:10.1007/BF00679906
- Harrison, J.B. & Furumoto, L. (1971). Pigeon audiograms. J. Auditory Res., 11, 33–42 (in Fay 1988).
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