Have your ever got your hearing tested? The result of a hearing test, more precisely the audiogram, shows how well you can hear different tones.
Low tones make the sound of a waterfall powerful. Mid tones are important for speech understanding. High tones add high fidelity and clear sound.
All tones between 20 and 20000 Hertz add to the world of sounds.
What does it mean if you can only hear tones below 100, 200 or 500 Hz? We have invented curtains which you can use to remove tones. Pull the left curtain to the right, and tones below the displayed frequency are removed. Pull the right curtain to the left, and all tones above the displayed frequency vanish. Open both curtains fully until you see the whole waterfall and you will hear all its tones.
How well can you understand speech if you cannot hear high tones? Some people experience this condition. They start losing the sensitivity to high tones over time.The highest tones are gone first. Some can hear tones up to 1000 Hz, some can only hear very low tones up to 250 Hz. Under such conditions, a cochlear implant can be used to transmit mid and high tones [1].
If you listen to the concert with the curtains all the way open, you will hear all its brilliance. Start dragging the left curtain to the right slowly, and you will realize how the warm sounds of the bass instruments vanish. Although low frequencies are not so important for speech understanding, they make up a large portion of the natural quality of a sound.
Mind that a mobilephone will not be able to play very low tones. If you want to explore the capabilities especially of the left curtain, use headphones or good loudspeakers!