Mechanical Filtering of Sound in the Inner Ear
We have studied the distortion generated by the cochlea to gain insight into the mechanisms responsible for the sharp tuning or ‘frequency selectivity’ of the inner ear. We used two stimulating tones of moderate intensity which are progressively separated in frequency, and measured the ear canal cub...
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Published in | Proceedings of the Royal Society. B, Biological sciences Vol. 250; no. 1327; pp. 29 - 34 |
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Main Authors | , , |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
London
The Royal Society
22.10.1992
Royal Society of London |
Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | We have studied the distortion generated by the cochlea to gain insight into the mechanisms responsible for the sharp tuning or ‘frequency selectivity’ of the inner ear. We used two stimulating tones of moderate intensity which are progressively separated in frequency, and measured the ear canal cubic distortion components which are generated as a consequence of the stimulus interaction in the cochlea. We inferred that the distortion is generated from the frequency region of the higher of the two stimulus tones and that it is then band-pass filtered by a structure which is tuned to a frequency just over half an octave below that of the high-frequency tone. We suggest that the structure responsible for this band-pass filtering is the tectorial membrane, and we conclude that our results support theories of cochlear mechanics in which resonances due to the tectorial membrane interact with those of the basilar membrane to enhance the frequency selectivity of the inner ear. |
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Bibliography: | ark:/67375/V84-M7J5DKV7-M istex:08FBEF0D7A6C70EF78D0FD32F934DB8844106F37 This text was harvested from a scanned image of the original document using optical character recognition (OCR) software. As such, it may contain errors. Please contact the Royal Society if you find an error you would like to see corrected. Mathematical notations produced through Infty OCR. ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23 |
ISSN: | 0962-8452 1471-2954 |
DOI: | 10.1098/rspb.1992.0126 |