Summer Singers

A note on insect song frequencies, paraphrased from “The Little Singers of Late Summer,” published in Ohio’s Arc of Appalachia Preserve System 2019-2020 News Magazine:

Scientific research shows that insect song exceeds the hearing of a normal human adult. The common true katydid, for instance, sings between the ranges of 3000 Hz to over 20,000 Hz. The highest our human ears can pick up is 18,000 Hz, but only when we are very young. Thus most adults can only hear the lower frequencies of the true katydid’s call. Our common true katydid is far from being the highest soprano of the insect world. Katydids have been discovered in Columbian rainforests singing at the incomprehensibly high frequency of 130,000 Hz, higher than even bats. Nature is indeed a noisier place than we’ve ever suspected.

In 1936, Vincent G. Dethier noted in his research: “Sad to say, full appreciation of summer’s music is reserved for the young because the pitch of so many of the songs is too high to be perceived by middle-aged and elderly ears. This failing is just one facet of the dulling of the senses with age, perhaps a divinely calculated diminution so that we may withdraw from the world gradually.”

Because low-frequency human speech is one of the last sounds to fade out for aging ears, older participants may be shocked to find that some of the sounds of the high-frequency percussion of the summer singers have gone silent to their ears. That said, the calls of the cicadas, ground and tree crickets, and both the true and so-called false katydids remain within the hearing range of most adults.

If you are starting to have a bit of trouble hearing adult conversation in impaired conditions (such as in crowded rooms, or the seat behind you), it is likely that you will not be able to hear the meadow katydids and the cone-headed grasshoppers, and you will probably have trouble hearing the small crickets. Chances are you will be able to hear common field crickets, cicadas, trigs, and tree crickets.