The Mechanisms of Human Hearing

Today, we are going to touch on the science of hearing, obviously if youre a

musical technician, you need very good hearing and it dont really help if youre
deaf now does it?
The Structure of the Ear
The structure of the ear is important to understanding how the ear actually works,
there are many parts including the hammer, the cochlea, tiny hairs and fluid
inside your ear. There is quite a lot to cover here. We'll go in order, first we cover
the outer ear, then the middle ear and the inner ear.
The actual shape of an ear for a human is very different to any other mammal's
ear, take a cat for example, they have large and pointed ears that can move
down, up, sideways and back and forth to help with hunting, a human's ear can
not pull off these complicated manouveres and is shaped more oval like than the
point of a cat. However, the main workings of an actual ear is similar among all
mammals. The outer ear is the only visible part of our ear, it's quite fleshy to the
touch and is made from cartrildge, the same material as our nose. When you
look at it, in consists of a large curved rim which is labelled as the helix, an inner
rim which is called the antihelix and this goes into the ear cannal which is where
sound is taken in. We also have an ear lobe, a sort of larger blob of skin hanging
from the ear, this can be either attatched to your skin a bit more or unnattatched.
The ear cannal stretches for about an inch down into the ear, where is where the
middle ear is located.
The middle ear is an air-filled cavity behind the tympanic membrane, includes
three bones (ossicles): the malleus (or hammer), incus (or anvil), and stapes (or
stirrup). The middle ear also connects to the upper throat via the Eustachian
tube. The Middle Ear is the portion of the ear internal to the eardrum, and
external to the oval window of the inner ear. Also mammalian middle ear contains
three ossicles, which transfers the vibrations of the eardrum into waves in the
fluid and membranes of the inner ear. The hollow space of the middle ear has
also been called the tympanic cavity, or cavum tympani. The eustachian tube
(also known as the auditory tube or the pharyngotympanic tube) joins the
tympanic cavity with the nasal cavity (nasopharynx), allowing pressure to
equalize between the middle ear and throat. The primary function of the middle
ear is to efficiently transfer acoustic energy from compression waves in air to
fluidmembrane waves within the cochlea.
The inner ear is where it gets all very technical and I use a lot of science terms,
mainly because this is where a lot of the sound we hear is sorted by our brain
and turned clear so we can understand what we hear, like what someone is
saying. It is the inner most part of the vertabrate ear, the inner ear is mainly used
for detecting sound and making sure it's balance when it comes to listening to it.
The main part is the bony labyrinth, it is a hollow cavity in the temporal bone of
the skull with a system of passages comprising two main functional parts. The
inner ear is really the main system of the ear, which is why it's the worst if it gets
damaged.
Ok, that was your lesson about the ear and how it works, next we are gonna look
at what happens if the ear gets damaged.

The limits of hearing

The threshold of pain is something anyone involved in music, someone firing a
gun or someone who handles large animals needs to keep in mind.
The main threshold is 120 dB as the pain threshold and define the audible sound
frequency range as ending at about 20,000 Hz where the threshold of hearing
and the threshold of pain meet. Decibels are the main thing that you have to
focus on, there are headsets that can block sound, ear plugs and such but
sometimes you still need to take the amount of decibels into account.

Physchoacoustics
Now, the next main part of learning how music affects the ear is learning what
physchoacoustics mean. One of the ways this affects music is in the Haas effect,
the haas effect or the precedence Effect is a psychoacoustic effect described by
helmut haas as the ability of our ears to localize sounds coming from anywhere
around us, basically it allows us to hear something coming from behind us, let's
say, and instead of wondering why we can't see what made the noise, we turn
around to see the source of it.
Something similar to the Haas effect is the cocktail party effect, the cocktail party
effect is the ability to be well, in a situation like a cocktail party and still be able to
hear clearly. Say someone calls your name in that enviroment, the cocktail party
effect allows you to pinpoint just who said it in a mix of like, 100 people, this
allows you to keep a coversation going. It also has the bonus of allowing you to
completely forget in a sense about all the other sounds around you, allowing you
to focus on one. Next, we look at the doppler effect.
The doppler effect is an interesting one. The Doppler effect (or Doppler shift) is
the change in frequency of a wave (or other periodic event) for an observer
moving relative to its source. It is named after the Austrian physicist Christian
Doppler, who proposed it in 1842 in Prague. Lets take a car, speeding along the
road, you on the path next to the road. Now as the car gets closer, it gets louder
and louder but then it honks it's horn, this sound starts at a high pitch and moves
to a low pitch, why? Well from the drivers perspective, that horn is playing the
same pitch that whole time, basically, the sound waves made by the horn are
bunched up as it gets close, as it passes you, those sound waves get further
away and also spred out more, making a more echoey sound. Best described by
Sheldon from the big bang theory.
But of course, sound can be dangerous, lets go over the health and safety of
sound

Health and Safety

Health and safety is important when it comes to sound, it can of course damage
your ears, if not make you completely deaf all together!
In the workplace, sound must be kept to a minumum level when doing actual

work and an acceptable coversation level when discussing something so as to

not cause any sound complaints in the area or damage anyones hearing. Sound
is important even when driving, that's why horns are so loud, it is to signal a
accident or something else bad that has happened.
Hearing protection can of course, help combat all of this. There are special
headphones/headsets that are designed to block sound coming in or at least to
try and muffle it so you don't hear as much, there are also ear plugs which can do
the exact same thing, block sound.
That's basically it for how sound affects the ears, all the forms, health and safety
and effects.