Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Scientific resources online seem to disagree about sound range, which is both wider and more sensitive than human hearing or voices.

http://www.lsu.edu/deafness/HearingRange.html

Cat sensitivity is a good 6 dB more sensitive so even if they're peakier in treble than humans, they still hear human males from further away than humans can hear them. Somewhat intuitively this makes sense, lots of human powered evolution to make dogs work well with males would force excellent hearing of male voices.

Also you can run a reasonably intelligible for all voices telephone service off 300 to 4000 hz for a century or so, so no point debating 50 hz cutoff vs 75 hz or whatever, its vastly wider band than telco standards either way. Something kids under 30 will never experience is before digital vocoders and high bit error rate cell phones, telco voice service was somewhat hi-fidelity almost AM radio sound quality. Maybe someday voice communication will be that high quality again.

Cats of course are very intelligent and can train humans to do all kinds of stuff that is likely very amusing to cats, as per the anecdotes of them training their humans to perform in singsong voices and whatever.



As my gf said - cat fascinated by laser pointer => human fascinated by cat.


More than an echo of Montaigne's famous quote, "when I am playing with my cat, how do I know she is not playing with me?"[1]

1: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Michel_de_Montaigne#Book_II


Communications grade audio, used to sound pretty good.




Consider applying for YC's Winter 2026 batch! Applications are open till Nov 10

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: