Animal Hearing Range Simulator
Compare the audible frequency range of 29 species (the human plus 28 animals) on a logarithmic chart, type any frequency to see which species can hear it, and play a clean test tone — with an honest check of whether your own speakers and ears can even reach it.
ℹ About the data: these are real published audible-range limits (approximate, measured near 60 dB SPL). The terrestrial and laboratory species come from the LSU School of Veterinary Medicine hearing-range chart (after Fay 1988, Warfield 1973 and Heffner 1983); the lab-animal limits and the marine mammals (dolphin, porpoise, beluga, sea lion) come from Heffner & Heffner (2007, "Hearing ranges of laboratory animals") and the published marine-mammal audiograms reviewed in the comparative-hearing literature. They describe which frequencies are audible — not loudness, sensitivity, or distance: "a dog hears farther" is really about acute sensitivity and an extra octave up high, not a wider range meaning longer reach. The tone player is a generator, not a measurement — no microphone, nothing recorded — and your speakers/headphones likely can't cleanly reproduce above ~18–20 kHz or below ~30–40 Hz, while genuine ultrasound (bats, dolphins) and infrasound (<20 Hz) are unreachable on normal consumer gear. Everything runs in your browser.
Animal Hearing Range Simulator tool
1 · Find who can hear a frequency
Type a frequency in hertz. The tool checks it against every species' published range (a direct data lookup, not a measurement) and highlights the matching bars on the chart below.
1 Hz to 200 kHz. Try 15000 (most adults lose this), 25000 (a dog whistle), or 100000 (bat / dolphin ultrasound).
2 · Hearing-range chart
Each bar is a species' audible range on a logarithmic frequency axis; the faint green band is the nominal human range (20 Hz–20 kHz). Bars that include your looked-up frequency are highlighted.
3 · Play a test tone
Listen to a pure sine tone at any frequency from 20 Hz to 22 kHz. Whether you actually hear it depends on your ears and your device — the indicators below are honest about both.
Logarithmic slider: 20 Hz on the left, 22 kHz on the right.
⚠ Start quiet and raise the level gently. High tones can be loud and fatiguing without sounding loud, and an inaudible tone may still be at high level — never crank a tone you can't hear. This is for education and curiosity, not a hearing test or a measurement.
4 · Searchable data & fun facts
Search a species name or a group (mammal, marine, bird, fish, amphibian).
How to Use the Simulator
1. Look up a frequency
Type a frequency in hertz. The tool instantly lists which of the 29 species have that frequency inside their published range and which don't, and tells you where it sits relative to human hearing. Try 25,000 Hz: well above the human limit, but comfortably inside a dog's or cat's range — the principle behind "silent" dog whistles.
2. Read the chart
Each horizontal bar is one species' audible band on a logarithmic axis (so every 10× in frequency takes equal space). Compare how far a bat or dolphin reaches into the ultrasonic versus how the chicken or goldfish top out below the human limit. Bars containing your looked-up frequency are outlined in white.
3. Play a tone
Move the logarithmic slider, set a low volume, and press Play. The "human" indicator says whether the tone is inside the human band, near its edge, or out of reach; the "device check" warns when your speakers or headphones probably can't reproduce it. Stop ends the tone cleanly — nothing is recorded.
4. Explore the data
Filter the table by name or group to read each species' exact range and a verified fun fact. The footnote names the published sources so you can check any figure yourself.
How It Works & the Honest Limits
An animal's hearing range is the band of frequencies it can detect at a moderate sound level — conventionally the limits where the threshold reaches about 60 dB SPL on a behavioural audiogram. The terrestrial and laboratory figures here are the widely-cited approximate ranges from the LSU School of Veterinary Medicine hearing-range chart (after R. R. Fay (1988, "Hearing in Vertebrates: A Psychophysics Databook"), Warfield (1973) and Heffner (1983)); the laboratory-animal limits and the marine mammals (which the LSU chart does not list) come from Heffner & Heffner's 2007 review "Hearing ranges of laboratory animals" (Journal of the American Association for Laboratory Animal Science) and the published marine-mammal audiograms reviewed in the comparative-hearing literature. They are approximate: individual animals, measurement conditions (in-air vs underwater for marine mammals), and the threshold criterion all shift the exact numbers, so treat them as typical ranges, not exact constants.
The chart plots each range on a logarithmic frequency axis, which is how we perceive pitch and the only sensible way to show more than four decades (10 Hz to 160 kHz) at once. The most important honest point is what a "range" means: it tells you which frequencies are audible, not how loud they are, how sensitive the ear is, or how far away a sound can be detected. A dog's famous ability to "hear farther" is really about exquisite sensitivity and an extra octave of high-frequency reach (which is why ultrasonic dog whistles work), not about the width of the band implying distance. Birds and many fish actually have narrower ranges than we do, yet hear superbly well within their band.
The tone player is a Web Audio oscillator routed through a gain stage to your speakers — a generator, not a measurement. There is no microphone, nothing is captured, and it cannot tell you what your hardware actually produces. Three hard limits matter. First, your browser's sample rate (typically 44.1 or 48 kHz) sets a Nyquist ceiling of about 22–24 kHz, so neither this page nor any normal microphone can produce or capture genuine ultrasound — that's why the tone is capped at 22 kHz and why hearing a real bat (to ~110 kHz) or dolphin (to ~150 kHz) needs a dedicated ultrasonic detector or recorder. Second, your speakers and headphones have limits of their own: most consumer gear rolls off above ~18–20 kHz and below ~30–40 Hz, and true infrasound below 20 Hz is essentially unreproducible — felt, not heard, and only on a capable subwoofer. Third, your ears: most adults can't hear much above 15–17 kHz, and the upper limit falls with age. So "it sounds silent" almost always means your device or your ears reached their limit — not that the data is wrong. This tool is for education and curiosity; it is not a hearing test or a clinical audiogram.