| Animals and Frequency
Many animals hear much higher than we do (wolves, dogs, whales, bats) but few actually hear better than we do: we're extraordinarily sensitive to fine frequency gradiations over a very wide range.
Dogs, for example, are very bad at distinguishing low frequencies (if you yell at Rover in basso profundo he's likely to just wag his tail and slobber). Barn owls, another interesting example, have an extraordinary ability to locate sounds in the vertical (height) axis, something we're completely incompetent at. They need to know how far they are from the ground to catch mice: we spend little time aloft (and not much time eating mice) so we haven't evolved much perceptually in that way. |