A Mexican long-tongued bat drinks from a cactus.
Humankind’s imagination has often been captured by the idea of being able to talk with animals. Being able to understand a cat when it’s meowing or a bird when it’s singing simply has a certain appeal for many people.
The Bat Listener takes this idea in an interesting direction. While it won’t make its users fluent in bat-speak, it does let them eavesdrop on the normally inaudible realm of bat echolocation.
The Bat Listener kit allows its user to hear the ultrasonic sounds of bats.
Echolocation — biological sonar — is one of the hallmarks of bats. As they navigate the night sky, bats make chirping sounds and listen for the echoes that tell them the location of edible insects and objects that should be avoided. We can’t hear any of this because the chirps are too high-pitched for human ears to register.
The Bat Listener takes those bat sounds and converts them into a lower frequency that humans can hear with ease. But it’s not limited to listening to just bats. According to the kit’s creator, it can be used to listen to many sounds normally too high-pitched to hear, from those emitted by compact fluorescent lights, gasses leaking from pipes or rats.
The Bat Listener is available in kit form, and comes with all the components needed for assembly, plus a laser-etched enclosure. Below is a build video for the kit. A demonstration of the Bat Listener translating ultrasonic sounds starts at 5:29.
