Abstract
We have studied the nature of sound and how sound waves are produced and propagate through media. However, the focus of this text is sound as experienced by people. Sounds of insects, of men, of a multitude of sources, reach our ears, perhaps providing us with our principle means of communication with the outside world. How can we hear these sounds differently? What happens to the sound that enters our ears? What is the essence of hearing? What is the source and explanation for the pleasure we have in hearing beautiful music or for the annoyance at hearing loud or dissonant noise? Many a reader might hope that science can arrive at answers to such questions. Unfortunately, science is severely limited in this domain.
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Notes
- 1.
The figure has been reproduced in black and white.
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Here is an excerpt from the website http://museum.utep.edu/archive/biology/DDossicles.htm:
Hearing is a wonderful thing, able to translate vibrations of air into sound. Numerous desert creatures rely on sound more than on sight, for many are nocturnal, only active during the dark hours. Part of the great sensitivity in mammals is due to the three small bones in our middle ears, the auditory ossicles. These transmit and amplify the vibrations of the ear drum, conveying them to the inner ear.
What is fascinating from an evolutionary viewpoint is their origins. Studies of embryos and fossils trace their origin far back in time. The ossicle next to the inner ear, the stapes, can be traced back to part of a gill arch in a very distant fish ancestor. The other two ossicles, the malleus and incus, are derived from bones that, in our reptilian ancestry, formed the joint between skull and lower jaw, as they do today in modern reptiles. After incipient mammals evolved a new jaw joint, those bones were in perfect position to be incorporated into a hearing device in evolution’s favorite avenue–jury-rigging structures for new roles.
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Archimedes , who receives credit for this discovery, is purported to have stated, “Give me a long enough stick, a place to stand, and a pivot, and I’ll move the earth!” The language here is quite loose. In fact, we need no such fancy system to move the earth. We do so every time we jump up into the air or walk or run—albeit by a minuscule unobservable amount.
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The physical basis for the fact that the fluid moves essentially en-masse is that the wavelength of a sound wave in the cochlear fluid ranges from 75 mm to 75 m for audio frequencies, and is therefore at least twice the length of the cochlear chamber.
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See Georg von Békésy, Experiments on Hearing (McGraw-Hill Co., Inc., N.Y.,1960) which is an extensive treatise on the subject. His work has been of utmost importance in treating people with hearing difficulties.
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Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz (1821–1894), German physicist, anatomist, and physiologist. He worked on acoustics, hydrodynamics, electrodynamics, thermodynamics, meteorology, optics, non-Euclidean geometry, and philosophy of natural sciences. He is known for his invention of the first ophthalmoscope, used by physicians to look into one’s eye. In 1847 he formulated (independently of Julius Robert Mayer and James Joule) the law of conservation of energy. Very often more than one scientist independently makes essentially the same discovery about the same time. Egos can lead to competition, arguments, public battles, and disappointment. Even the great Newton tried to blot out the name of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz for the latter’s co-discovery (along with Newton) of the differential and integral calculus in mathematics. See the sad but fascinating history of Mayer’s work and his frustration from lack of recognition in the following website: http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi722.htm.
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There is a third factor that we mention here without details. Recently, Dennis Freeman has conducted research that reveals that the tectorial membrane (see Fig. 10.10) plays a considerable role in amplifying the effect of the frequency-dependent envelope in pitch discrimination. See MIT’s Technology Review, Volume III, number 1, page M16.
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Ernst Mach (1838–1916), Austrian physicist and philosopher (Fig. 10.15). The basis of Mach’s natural philosophy was that all knowledge is a matter of sensations, so that what people call “laws of nature” are only summaries of experience provided by their own fallible senses. He discovered that if a body moves through the air at a speed faster than the speed of sound, it must produce a shock wave. The so- called Mach number is the speed of a body relative to the speed of sound. Thus, a speed of “Mach 3” is equal to three times the speed of sound in air.
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An analogy can be drawn between the time variation of the displacement, velocity, and acceleration of an automobile on the one hand, and the spatial variation along the length of the basilar membrane of its displacement, its degree of bending, and the above variation of the degree of bending.
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Gunther, L. (2019). The Ear. In: The Physics of Music and Color. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19219-8_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19219-8_10
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