Science Experiment - Range of Hearing - Family Fun

Jim H - VA USA

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Sep 19, 2020
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Background:
My son told me tonight that a power cord in our den was making a strange noise. I went in to check with him. He pointed at a transformer for one of our printers. I held it to my ear and herd squat. Nothing. I said, "can you hear it now?" He said "yes."

I said, "you are crazy, boy, are you on drugs again?!"

Just kidding. I said, "is it really high pitched?" He said, "like, yeah, boomer, what does high-pitched mean" or something like that.

Warnings:
Don't do this with headphones on full blast; could damage hearing. May want to remove any sensitive pets from the room.

Science stuff:
As we age, along with other things, our range of hearing decreases, starting at the age of about eight. The decrease can be caused by the condition of the ears and nervous system, as well as hearing loss as a result of damage from loud noises.

They say that hearing is the third thing to go. (joke)

Here is a chart for range of hearing for various animals...

1634689408743.png

Source: Wiki: Hearing range

Experiment:
So then for fun, we all went to this website and played some music...


My son could hear tones well above 14,000 Hertz. I could only hear up to about 13,300 Hz. My beautiful lovely younger wife could hear up to about 13,800. I think she is lying.

Kind of fun. If you don't have annoying kids around, maybe you could try it with your pet dog, cat, or porpoise.
 
Last edited:
I was an artilleryman in the Army, a rock musician for 30 years, a handloader and shooter, and have shot several hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammo over my lifetime. Mine dropped out at 8kHz.

The dog is old and has lost her hearing, so the high freqs didn't even faze her.
 
Background:
My son told me tonight that a power cord in our den was making a strange noise. I went in to check with him. He pointed at a transformer for one of our printers. I held it to my ear and herd squat. Nothing. I said, "can you hear it now?" He said "yes."

I said, "you are crazy, boy, are you on drugs again?!"

Just kidding. I said, "is it really high pitched?" He said, "like, yeah, boomer, what does high-pitched mean" or something like that.

Warnings:
Don't do this with headphones on full blast; could damage hearing. May want to remove any sensitive pets from the room.

Science stuff:
As we age, along with other things, our range of hearing decreases, starting at the age of about eight. The decrease can be caused by the condition of the ears and nervous system, as well as hearing loss as a result of damage from loud noises.

They say that hearing is the third thing to go. (joke)

Here is a chart for range of hearing for various animals...

View attachment 553796
Source: Wiki: Hearing range

Experiment:
So then for fun, we all went to this website and played some music...


My son could hear tones well above 14,000 Hertz. I could only hear up to about 13,300 Hz. My beautiful lovely younger wife could hear up to about 13,800. I think she is lying.

Kind of fun. If you don't have annoying kids around, maybe you could try it with your pet dog, cat, or porpoise.
Sorry, couldn't hear you typing........




:)





Yeah a lot of my hearing is shot. Waiting on a some new hearing aides.
 
Here is a chart for range of hearing for various animals...

I have two kinds of actual real tone generators and a $300,000 playback system. That chart is highly generalized. My hearing is pretty flat over 11 octaves terminating around 16k. There really is little sound or music above about 8k, everything above that is air.
 

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