How Does Dogs’ Hearing Compare To Humans’?

There is a lot of misunderstanding out there about how well dogs hear. It’s true that their hearing is better than that of humans in a couple ways. They can hear higher-pitched sounds than humans can, and they can hear quieter sounds than we can in some frequency ranges. Because of this, they have a reputation for superb hearing. But their hearing capabilities are not better across the board. Our capabilities are superior to theirs in a few important ways as well.

Here is what the experimental literature tells us about dogs’ hearing compared to that of humans. First, we’ll cover a couple of things we need to know about the characteristics of sound.

Measuring and Defining Sounds

There are two aspects of sound that are most important to understand and identify: frequency (pitch) and sound pressure level. Sound pressure level (SPL)  is a physically measurable quantity that corresponds very roughly to what we subjectively experience as volume.

There are other qualities that are essential to sound, such as timbre and duration. But frequency and SPL are the most important to understand.

Frequency is how high or low the sound is in pitch. It is measured in cycles per second or Hertz. Low, rumbly sounds have low frequencies, that is, fewer cycles per second. High sounds such as digital beeps, children singing, and most birdsong have more cycles per second. Some frequencies of well-known sounds are:

  • The lowest note on an 88-key piano: 28 Hz
  • The highest note on an 88-key piano: 4,186 Hz
  • The low rumbles of thunder: 5–220 Hz (Holmes, 1971)
  • The typical range of human conversation: 80–8,000 Hz (Fant, 2006, p. 218).  The fundamental frequencies of speech are on the low end; fricative consonants like f and s are on the high end.
  • Typical digital beeps and whistles: 1,500–5,000 Hz (measurements by author)
  • The high range of hummingbird vocalizations: 12,000 Hz (Rusch, Pytte, & Ficken, 1996)

Sound pressure level is measured in decibels, a logarithmic unit. The decibel scale is used because the range of detectable sound is so wide.  A linear scale would have to go from 0 to greater than 100 million units to cover the range of sounds we can respond to. But SPL doesn’t exactly correspond to how loud we perceive a sound to be. That is termed “apparent loudness” and differs from person to person, organism to organism. It can’t be objectively measured in a practical way. But SPL can be objectively measured, and those measurements are what we have available to tell us roughly how “loud” we will experience a sound to be.

Logarithmic scales are counterintuitive and a bit difficult to understand. But you can get the idea of the range of sounds we can hear and how loud they are on the image below. You can also consult this article by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control to help you get your bearings with decibels.

Dogs’ Ears vs. Humans’ Ears

The form and function of dogs’ and humans’ physical hearing setup is similar. Anatomically, both are binaural, that is, we have two ears and our brains use and integrate the input from both.

An excellent article on the comparison between dog and human hearing says it this way:

The auditory systems of dogs and humans share the same basic plan and physical structures with sound waves collected in the outer ear and amplified via the middle ear before being transduced into electrical signals by the inner ear.  

Barber et al, 2020, p. 46

The article cited above has an excellent side-by-side comparison of dog and human ear anatomy on page 51. 

A significant difference between the two species is that dogs’ ears can move independently of head movement. Some researchers have proposed that this makes their hearing more sensitive, that is, moving their ears allows them to hear sounds that would be inaudible in other ear positions. Others have proposed that dogs with erect ears have a hearing advantage. I have not found definitive studies on this, although a study on cats showed that ear construction amplified their hearing of certain directional sounds up to 28 dB (Phillips et al., 1982).

Ear movement seems likely to improve the localization of sound, but so far there appear to be no studies about that in dogs.

Another important difference is that humans have special cells in the tympanic cavity that help us handle pressure changes better, for instance, in airplane flight. 

Finally, dogs’ ears are highly heterogeneous across the species. The effects of this are little studied so far, which is surprising when you consider the difference in outer ear structure (pinnae) for breeds such as German Shepherd Dogs and a Bassett Hounds.

Dogs’ Hearing vs. Humans’ Hearing

OK, so now we are ready to compare dogs’ hearing to humans’.

High Frequencies

Dogs can hear much higher frequencies than humans can. A young human with normal hearing can typically hear up to about 20,000 Hz (Gelfand, 2010, p. 166). As humans age, that upper limit decreases to about 12,000 Hz. Dogs can hear to 45,000 Hz (Heffner, 1983). Contra to some misinformation out there, dogs do not hear sounds in the millions of Herz.

Low Frequencies

Humans can hear slightly lower frequencies than dogs can. We can hear pitches down to about 20 Hz.  We can hear lower than this, down to about 2 Hz, but we don’t perceive these notes as pitches (Gelfand, 2010, p. 166). Sound lower than 20 Hz is called the infrasound range. Dogs can hear down to about 67 Hz (Heffner, 1983). There was speculation in the past that large dogs such St. Bernards can hear low frequencies better. But this was not born out by Heffner’s research. The dog that could hear the lowest frequencies best was a poodle, and the St. Bernard came in last (Heffner, 1983). 

Sound Localization

Humans can locate sounds more precisely than dogs can. For humans, the so-called minimum audible angle is 1° or less in our strongest zone and frequency (Mills, 1958).  The minimal audible angle for dogs is 4° (Fay and Wilber, 1989, p. 519). 

Psychologist Dr. Stanley Coren (2005, p. 47) points out that sound location is one of the first capabilities that dogs lose if they go deaf.

Threshold of Hearing

The threshold of hearing is the sound pressure level at which a sound becomes audible. This is also known as an organism’s hearing sensitivity. In the lower frequency range (125–500 Hz), dogs’ and humans’ thresholds of hearing are about the same. At higher pitches, though, dogs have a lower threshold. That is, they can hear sounds at a lower volume than we can. This is true in the range of  500–8,000 Hz, where they can hear noises that are from 13–19 decibels lower (quieter) than we can (Lipman & Grassi, 1942). This is a significant difference. At frequencies higher than 8,000 Hz, the discrepancy grows wider. Then comes the range where we can’t hear at all, but dogs can (20,000–45,000 Hz).

There is a widespread claim that dogs can hear things at “four times the distance” humans can. I haven’t found the source for this and the information above shows that it isn’t a general rule. There are many variables in play when sounds travel over a distance. The range in which dogs’ hearing really excels is the high-frequency range. But this is also the range where sounds don’t travel over long distances. The claim may be related to Lipman and Grassi’s above data point that some dogs can hear noises that are up to 19 dB lower than humans in some ranges. That 19 dB difference would correspond to a factor of four in loudness (but not sound pressure level, sorry). But it’s at a specific frequency, 4,000 Hz (Lipman & Grassi, 1942). If that’s the case, the “four times the distance” claim is an overgeneralization and an impractical comparison.

The Barber overview comparing dog and human hearing quotes the “four times the distance” phrase as a belief, and the references it lists demonstrate it as a belief. The article doesn’t provide evidence for it.

Summary: Comparing the Hearing of Humans and Dogs

CapabilityWhich species does it better?
Hearing low frequency soundsHumans
Hearing high frequency soundsDogs by far
Locating soundsHumans
Hearing quiet soundsTie in lower common ranges; dogs for the big win in upper ranges

Auditory Processing

The qualities listed above have to do with the physiological capabilities of hearing. Dogs’ abilities to classify and discriminate sounds have been studied as well. The following are not characteristics of hearing, per se, but of the brain’s processing of an auditory stimulus.

Pitch Discrimination

Dogs can discriminate between pitches. They have been tested using both operant and respondent methods. Dogs can discriminate up to 1/3 tone, for instance, between 2,820 and 2,900 Hz (Dworkin, 1935). This is a bit finer than the scale of notes used in most Western music, which progresses by 1/2 tones. They can likely perform even better. In one experiment, a single dog was able to discriminate between tones of 29,500 and 30,000 Hz (Andreyev, 1934). This is far above the range of human hearing, and a smaller increment than 1/3 tone.

Tempo Discrimination

I’m not sure what to call this one, but experiments have been performed to test dogs’ response to different metronome settings. A musician would call these settings differences in tempo. Tempo is measured in beats per minute. For instance, in a tempo of 60 beats per minute, the beats are exactly one second apart.  Dogs can discriminate between 118 beats per minute and 120 beats per minute (Andreyev, 1934). To understand, try this online metronome. Enter the setting of 118 beats per minute, listen, then change it to 120 beats per minute. Could you tell which one it was if someone played one of them for you out of the blue?

Sound Source Categorization

Dogs can learn to categorize sounds. In one study, they were able to differentiate between “sounds that dogs make” and “other sounds.” The other sounds included mechanical sounds and sounds made by other animals (Heffner, 1975).

Timbre Discrimination

Timbre is defined as:

a sensory attribute of sound that enables one to judge differences between sounds having the same pitch, loudness, and duration (Gelfand 2010, p. 227).

We witness dogs’ ability to discriminate timbre empirically all the time. Does your dog discriminate the sound of your car from others? Your voice from your best friend’s? Sure! but the research on it seems pretty limited. Some studies were performed in the early 20th century that showed that dogs could discriminate the difference between the same note played on a tuning fork or a keyboard instrument, and also between different chords (Razran & Warden, 1959).

A different kind of evidence of timbre discrimination was shown in Adachi et al’s study (2007). They demonstrated that dogs could match their owner’s face to the owner’s voice (contrasted with another voice and face) calling their name. Ratcliffe et al (2014) similarly showed that dogs could likely discriminate voices by human gender, which may involve timbre discrimination.

Since a lot of what comprises timbre is the overtone structure of a sound, timbre discrimination could be a subset of pitch discrimination.

Human Speech Sound Discrimination

There are also studies that investigate dogs’ abilities to discriminate between aspects of human speech. These are not about dogs’ comprehension of language, which is a different issue. These are tests to see if dogs can hear the difference between certain human-spoken consonant and vowel sounds.

For instance, Baru (1975) demonstrated that dogs could discriminate between the vowel sounds i and a. The dogs were trained with shock, where wrong answers and “no responses” were punished.

I’m mentioning one study even though it is a master’s thesis. Athanasiadou (2012) tested vowel discrimination in dogs using the preferential looking paradigm. This is a noninvasive method used with human infants. The dogs could discriminate between the Dutch vowel sounds a and e. I hope that future studies of language discrimination follow this method rather than Baru’s.

There are quite a few studies of dogs vis-à-vis words and language, but these veer away from dogs’ discrimination capabilities. The discrimination abilities are taken as a given. If you are interested in speech sound discrimination, there is a review article by Kriengwatana et al that synopsizes a lot of that research for dogs and other animals and is available free online.

This article is a cornerstone for a new section of my blog devoted to dogs and sounds. I will be offering some very practical advice. I hope you stick around for more!

Dogs and Sound Posts

References

Adachi I., Kuwahata H., Fujita K. (2007). Dogs recall their owner’s face upon hearing the owner’s voice. Animal Cognition 10 17–21

Andreyev, L. A. (1934). Extreme limits of pitch discrimination with higher tones. Journal of Comparative Psychology18(3), 315-332.

Athanasiadou, P. (2012). Studying speech sound discrimination in dogs (Master’s thesis).

Barber, A. L., Wilkinson, A., Montealegre-Z, F., Ratcliffe, V. F., Guo, K., & Mills, D. S. (2020). A comparison of hearing and auditory functioning between dogs and humans. Comparative Cognition & Behavior Reviews15, 45-94.

Baru A. V. (1975). “Discrimination of synthesized vowels [a] and [i] with varying parameters (Fundamental frequency, intensity, duration and number of formants) in dogs,” in Auditory Analysis and Perception of Speech, eds Fant G., Tatham M. A. A., editors. (Waltham, MA: Academic Press; ), 91–101.

Coren, S. (2005). How dogs think: understanding the canine mind. Simon and Schuster.

Dworkin, S. (1935). Alimentary motor conditioning and pitch discrimination in dogs. American Journal of Physiology-Legacy Content112(2), 323-328.

Fant, G. (2006). Speech acoustics and phonetics: Selected writings (Vol. 24). Springer Science & Business Media.

Fay, R. R., & Wilber, L. A. (1989). Hearing in vertebrates: a psychophysics databook. Hill-Fay Associates.

Gelfand, S. (2010). Hearing: An introduction to psychological and physiological acoustics. Informa Healthcare.

Heffner, H. (1975). Perception of biologically meaningful sounds by dogs. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America58(S1), S124-S124.

Heffner, H. E. (1983). Hearing in large and small dogs: Absolute thresholds and size of the tympanic membrane. Behavioral Neuroscience97(2), 310.

Holmes, C. R., Brook, M., Krehbiel, P., & McCrory, R. (1971). On the power spectrum and mechanism of thunder. Journal of Geophysical Research, 76(9), 2106-2115.

Kriengwatana, B., Escudero, P., & ten Cate, C. (2015). Revisiting vocal perception in non-human animals: a review of vowel discrimination, speaker voice recognition, and speaker normalization. Frontiers in Psychology5, 1543.

Lipman, E. A., & Grassi, J. R. (1942). Comparative auditory sensitivity of man and dog. The American Journal of Psychology55(1), 84-89.

Mills, A. W. (1958). On the minimum audible angle. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America30(4), 237-246.

Phillips, D. P., Calford, M. B., Pettigrew, J. D., Aitkin, L. M., & Semple, M. N. (1982). Directionality of sound pressure transformation at the cat’s pinna. Hearing research8(1), 13-28.

Ratcliffe, V. F., McComb, K., & Reby, D. (2014). Cross-modal discrimination of human gender by domestic dogs. Animal Behaviour91, 127-135.

Razran, H. S., & Warden, C. J. (1929). The sensory capacities of the dog as studied by the conditioned reflex method (Russian schools). Psychological Bulletin26(4), 202.

Rusch, K. M., Pytte, C. L., & Ficken, M. S. (1996). Organization of agonistic vocalizations in Black-chinned Hummingbirds. The Condor98(3), 557-566.

Copyright 2019 Eileen Anderson

Eileen Anderson has a master’s degree in harpsichord performance from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and a master’s degree in applied science, with research in active noise control, from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. She published her results in the Journal of the Arkansas Academy of Science.

5 thoughts on “How Does Dogs’ Hearing Compare To Humans’?

  1. Very interesting! I know people often say that dogs respond better to higher-pitched verbal cues and this would seem to support that, if dogs can hear and discriminate better at higher pitches.

    I’ve also heard anecdotal evidence that dogs are less likely to exhibit fear of humans with higher voices – we’ve all met a dog that “just hates men”, right? Maybe lower voices are scarier because they just aren’t as clear to the dog, perhaps.

    (I know I’m not being terribly scientific here, but just talking about ideas that occur to me that I find interesting.)

    I wonder if dogs can be trained to have absolute or perfect pitch? Could you train them to discriminate so they only respond to a C6, for example, as opposed to “respond to the higher note”?

    If they can recognise the C6, can they generalise to other Cs? Do they perceive octave intervals as the “same note” as most humans do without any musical training?

    And why on earth do I find it so difficult to call an animal’s name without singing it in a descending minor third like a doorbell? 😉

    (Yep, the psychology and neuroscience of music was my interest at university and I’m a choral vocalist myself, why do you ask? :P)

    1. They do seem to respond to the higher voices, don’t they? I didn’t include it, but their acoustic “comfort zone” is said to be quite a bit higher than ours. But I don’t think that’s experimental; it’s just math.

      The pitch discrimination exercises correspond pretty well to perfect pitch. Interestingly, Pavlov did those experiments, too. He conditioned dogs to drool at the sound of a certain tone by pairing it with food (probably meat powder). He played other tones and didn’t pair them. He worked it down to about a half a step. So, for example, a dog might drool for a c but not a c-sharp. Others taught it operantly, where the dog had to press a lever for food, but it only paid out when preceded by the correct tone.

      Did you watch my little recall video where I call Zani? Minor third. I’ve heard both major and minor third doorbells!

      I wonder about the octave thing, too. In a later article I’ll be talking about what we know about what dogs perceive in music. Which is not very much compared to some other species. Dogs have never been tested for discriminating consonance and dissonance, for example, while quite a few other species have. But that’s for later!

      Thanks for writing. Nice to talk music with you!

      1. I always enjoy your blogs, but I’m especially looking forward to these ones!

        I know my old dog Summer (good name choice, right?) would respond to any two-syllable word if I sang it the same way I sang her name, but she could clearly discriminate between her name and something else if I spoke it normally. I never tried calling her with a different interval but I wish I had now just to see the response!

        It does make me think that we could use intervals to help communicate better with our dogs – she seemed to prioritised the processing of tone before the actual word itself, so if we sing each cue differently maybe that would be clearer to them and they’d process faster.

        I’m planning on getting a dog later this year (I have been way too long without a dog) and I’m already thinking that teaching them to recognise some easy intervals (or even short tunes like Rue’s whistle in The Hunger Games) and responding differently to each one would be an amazing and fun party trick…

        1. Yes, Summer is a lovely name!

          That would be fun to teach them! I use the minor third thing for all my dogs’ recalls and they all come for everybody’s, whatever the name. But of course I reinforce them, so I can’t say for sure that they wouldn’t heed the actual word if they needed to.

          I was going to teach my Zani to recognize pitch, but she’s sound sensitive (I’ll be writing about that too) and also she is the worst at auditory cues of any dog I’ve ever had. So maybe I’ll teach Clara.

          Nice chatting about this stuff!

          Eileen

  2. Regarding dog’s positive reactions to higher frequency voices, consider that associated emotions play a part. In anger, voices for dogs and humans get lower. So rather than an indication of how well they hear the frequency, it is more that they know the speaker isn’t angry and more likely to be in a good mood. This denotes safety- their primary concern.

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