Sound Menagerie: Other Animals’ Sound Perception

Abstract

Given the superlative range of human sound perception, and the wondrous ways we use our sense of hearing, one might assume that human sound perception represents the pinnacle of bio-acoustic adaptation in nature. But the success of our species is not in specialization; humans are generalists, and while we hear quite well, our hearing is by no way “the most,” the “best,” or the “finest” of all creatures—it is just very well adapted to our habitat and our perceptual priorities. The impressive quality of our gift has unfortunately set much of our scientific research up to compare other animals’ use of sound to our own. While this strategy has yielded some amazing information on animal bio-acoustics, we have by the limits of our own perception been hampered in understanding some of the finer points of how other animals use sound. This is particularly the case when those ways are alien to us.

Call the dominating inhibitions that determine our point of view anything you wish. They affect all of us, including scientists. All are saddled with heavy linguistic, national, regional, and generational impediments to perception. Like those of everyone else, the scientists’ hidden assumptions affect his or her behavior, unwittingly directing thought. (Lynn Margulis, “Symbiotic Planet”)¹

…with few exceptions, the vocalizations of animals—the songs and calls of birds, the grunts and roars and purrs of mammals, the croaks of toads, and frogs, the cricket’s chirp, the astonishing array of underwater clicks and booms emitted by fish—all of these sounds evolved for purposes that had nothing to do with mankind. They bespeak other business, and it is only relatively recently that scientifically minded people have begun to pry effectively into what that business is all about. (Eugene S. Morton and Jake Page, “Animal Talk: Science and the Voices of Nature”)²