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audiofrequency

why do these sounds make a dog unhappy?

This is an odd one. I'm not sure it's the right place to ask, but maybe there are some sound experts who can chime in? (no pun intended)

We use two sounds on our website to indicate success and failure on a quiz. Those are very simple and short sounds.

Somehow one of our customers reported that her dog was whimpering and really upset with both of those sounds. He's normally fine with lots of other sounds that dogs are typically unhappy with including loud sounds, hoovers etc. She even said it happens when she uses headphones!

Other than muting, or replacing those sounds (and upsetting other dogs?), is there anything we can do to clean the sound or detect what specifically makes them upset this or other dogs?

Downvoters: I think this question crosses over between biology/physiology/physics and signal and audio processing. The answers I'm getting now actually demonstrate this. It requires this cross-domain knowledge. In any case, I'm happy to delete it if this seems to not jive well with this community. I think my intentions were positive and I added a bounty to try to solve this real problem. It saddens me to even see downvotes for the answers although they made an effort to help.

EDIT: I'm unable to delete this question it seems. I get an error message.

cannot delete question

EDIT2: In case it's more helpful, here's a spectrum analysis of both sounds using Audacity. There are lots of different options, but this is using the default options for Analyze->Plot spectrum

fail2 sound

success2 sound

Solution

  • This question is not at the right place (and down-voted) but for your information you may take a look on Frequency Range of Dog Hearing where you can read that:

    Humans can hear sounds approximately within the frequencies of 20 Hz and 20,000 Hz

    [...]

    The frequency range of dog hearing is approximately 40 Hz to 60,000 Hz

    Note also that:

    The shape of a dog's ear also helps it hear more proficiently.

    A similar example is :

    A vacuum cleaner, which merely sounds loud to us, can produce a high frequency sound which may scare dogs away

    I expect that very low frequency can also scare dog (like thunderstorm sound)

    You may use a spectrum analyser software (open source audio-software like Audacity allow you to do the job) to double check if low/high frequency are present in the sound.

    In my opinion you may use a Band-pass filter, to cut all frequency lower than 50KHz & higher than 15KHz to avoid the "the vacuum cleaner" and "thunderstorm sound" effect (which may scare dogs.)

    You may finally take a look on the Audacity low pass filter manual to know how to apply this filter on your sound.