How does an animal’s environment affect the frequency of sound they use?
Animals use songs and sounds to communicate. Some of these sounds are produced within human auditory ranges, which for most of us is between 20 and 20,000 vibrations per second. (20 HZ-20kHZ) Sound that is lower than 20 vibrations is called infrasound. These are sounds that we cannot hear, but can be seen on a spectrogram. Thunderstorms and earthquakes produce sounds that are in the infrasound ranges. Elephants communicate with infrasound. This allows them to communicate with each other over very long distances. Some animals produce sounds that have more than 20,000 vibrations per second. These are called ultrasounds. Bats use ultrasound to communicate and find insects to eat. A bat will produce a high pitched squeak and the echoes of the ultrasound wave will bounce off of the insect indicating its position to a hungry bat. The human ear can recognize single sine waves because sounds with such a waveform sound “clean” or “clear” to humans; some sounds that approximate a pure sine wave
