Questions tagged [hearing]
For questions regarding the sensation (transduction) and perception of sound information by the brain in humans and animals
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What does it sound like, subjectively, when a shockwave bursts your eardrums?
A pressure pulse above 150 dB will burst the eardrums. I speculate that displacement of the membrane is far above normal range. I speculate that the initial displacement will get passed along to the ...
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What are the biological reasons for hearing loss?
I recently stumbled upon an interesting online hearing test on YouTube, and it got me thinking about the root causes of hearing loss. I'm curious about the main contributing factors behind the loss of ...
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Is There Any Evidence that People Prefer Just Intonation
In music, it's common to hear the refrain that people like harmonics (notes played at frequencies that are rational multiples of one another) the most out of different combinations of notes (at least ...
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How can sinusoid sound be perceived as having constant loudness?
To elaborate, given an audible, sinusoidal wave $A\sin(ft)$ with constant $A$ and $f$. That sounds constant to us.
Now from a few posts linked below, I understand that as stereocilia of the hair cells ...
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How do hair cells recognize frequencies?
I read that "a neuron can fire up to 1000 all-or-none impulses/sec" 1. But the hair cells in our ears are trimmed to recognize frequencies up to 20 kHz.
How can a hair cell detect a ...
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Why do psychologists tend to associate guilt with auditory admonition?
Can you please expound the sentence that I marked with red lines? The green underlie refers to Wolfram Eberhard's 1967 book Guilt and Sin in Traditional China, page 12. But my library is closed ...
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Is Tinnitus caused by damage to the dorsal cochlear nucleus (DCN) or Auditory Cortex, which can be repaired?
It is well known that loud noises can lead to hearing problems such as temporary hearing loss or tinnitus (ringing in the ears) and even permanent hearing loss. But this is the first time scientists ...
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How can the uncertainty relation be exceeded in hearing?
Majka et al. (2015) [PDF] shows that some trained people can discern pitch differences faster than the uncertainty relation permit. How can this be possible?
Abstract
The human hearing sense is an ...
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How do the outer hair cells amplify the traveling wave?
Depending on the movement frequency, outer hair cells can stretch and contract, amplifying the amplitude of the traveling wave at the basilar membrane.
How can they do this exactly? what is the point ...
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Deflection of the basilar membrane
The basilar membrane becomes thicker and heavier from the basal end to the apical upper end - this is why high frequencies are perceived in the lower range and low frequencies in the upper range.
But ...
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What is the cochlear frequency response by number of hair cells?
I am trying to recreate the cochlea/basilar membrane response to sound and want to know how the hair cells are bucketed or binned by frequency, so an ideal list would be something like 10 kHz - 12 kHz:...
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How to produce the ganzfeld effect?
This is the closest stack exchange site I could find that suites my question: How can I best produce the ganzfeld effect? I tried with noise canceling earbuds, white noise, and a paper sleep mask.
I'...
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How can someone asleep recognize a very brief sound?
I have a snoring girlfriend. To interrupt her snoring, I make a sound similar to the very brief sound gas makes when opening a soda can or bottle (had a snoring brother, I know this technique works ...
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Is mapping sound frequencies to the vertical axis universal?
Shrill notes are said to be "high", and rumbles are said to be "low". Humans seem to metaphorically map frequency to the vertical axis, and in the cultures that I know of, high frequency is ...
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E-prime: Inline script to present sounds from a text file
I am trying to build an experiment that: (1) present Instructions, (2) plays a list of sounds from a text file and (3) says Goodbye. I have problem on (2) which for the moment is built with an inline ...
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Proportion of cortex dedicated for vision and hearing
I have read in some websites that the percentage of the cortex devoted to processing visual information is from 30-66% with some claiming even 90%. And compared to that, only about 3% is dedicated to ...
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Is it possible to condition oneself to not be bothered by distressing sounds?
It is my (layman's) understanding that a domestic cat learns to meow in a specific tone (I've even read that it can resemble a human baby crying) in order to get the owner's attention.
Regardless of ...
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How to prime gammatone filters?
A set of gammatone band-pass filters are often used to model the filtering performed by the human inner ear. For example, "BatSLAM: Simultaneous Localization and Mapping Using Biomimetic Sonar" Jan ...
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What are the temporal limits of the auditory system?
I would like to know what the time scale is of the human ear. I mean, what is the shortest duration of a sound that a human ear can notice
and what is the longest duration of a sound that a human ear ...
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How does speed listening work?
I've recently gotten into listening to podcasts. Over time, as I get accustomed to the speaker's voice, I'm able to increase the speed of the podcast to as high as 3x speed. It still feels "normal" to ...
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Is speech perceived as set of phonemes by human?
I am currently trying to understand how speech is being perceived and understood. I am currently aware of the workings of inner ears and the basilar membrane and its frequency filtering, but going ...
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Why do you hear music inside your head when wearing headphones, even when you hold the phones some distance from your head?
When you wear headphones for listening to music you hear the music inside your head. Even when you hold the two speakers at the same distance from your ears the music is still heard inside your head. ...
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What timing of visual emphasis paired with a spoken word provides the best cognition? [closed]
I am working on an animation in which there are three somewhat small font words (Environmental, Social, and Economic) together with three colored horizontal histogram bars on each side of the labels ...
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What is the bias called when listening to the same sound repeatedly?
When people are made to listen to the same sounds repeatedly, it can trigger placebo effects, i.e., they think they've heard something new or different the $ Nth $ time around, when in fact they haven'...
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How do congenitally deaf and mute people think?
If a person is born deaf and dumb, how can they think? In "what language" do these people think? Do they develop their own inner language?
Unfortunately I have not found an answer, and I actually ...
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Can binaural beats be generated with carrier tones outside the audible frequency range?
I know that binaural beats are a controversial subject, as they might not work for everyone. In my own tests on myself I shuffled multiple recordings of binaural beats, with stereo headphones on, not ...
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Why I read by hearing the words?
This question requires very little background:
1. English is my second language and I find myself thinking mostly in it
2. I tend to listen more than to read it
When I read a book from the computer ...
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Hard to think when hearing audible speech
I don't know what is the exact cause of this but when there is some song playing around me or someone is talking near me its harder for me to concentrate my thoughts or imagine something. However pure ...
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Do non-human primates exhibit the Kiki/Bouba effect?
After understanding that cats cannot experience the Kiki/Bouba effect, I wonder if smart non-human primates can experience it. There is evidence suggesting that Chimpanzees associate high pitch with ...
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Interclick interval resolution of the ear
Let's say I have an almost perfect metronome which ticks at 60 beats per minute, except for one beat that is slightly off from time to time.
What's the maximum error this metronome can have without a ...
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How do deaf people get feedback on their speech?
When we speak, our ears give us feedback on the same. This, presumably, helps in learning a language and adjusting the volume of our speech. How do deaf people get this feedback to learn a new ...
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Why might computerised voices in the background be more disruptive than human voices? [closed]
The Scenario:
Imagine yourself in a classroom with students. The teacher told all students that have not read the text for today, should do it now. You have not read it and therefore you begin to read ...
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Why do people tap their foot to music?
When listening to music, I often see people tap their feet either to the main beat or the dominating rhythm of the music.
Why do people do this?
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What is the difference between noise reduction and noise cancellation?
I had a question about sirens in another section which led to a question in physics section...and I was told my question is more suitable for cognitive science. So here it goes:
There are many kinds ...
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Does "hearing" give off an electronic signal? [closed]
I'm thinking in terms of the middle ear and the very intricate and tiny bones that process a "sound wave" into "what we hear." Is there an output to the middle ear ossicle chain bones such that a ...
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How do we hear our inner voice?
How do we perceive inner speech? Does it follow the same neural pathways as normal acoustic speech? If yes, what is the extent of overlap between the two neural pathways?
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How does the inner ear encode sound intensity?
Different areas of the inner ear (the cochlea) are sensitive to different acoustic frequencies. Hence, the cochlea basically performs a fast Fourier transform on the audio signal. This spectral ...
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Blocking out unwanted sound sources
Suppose you are in a room with two other persons, both of them talking. If you want to hear one of them, you are able to block out the other even though he is talking (although not very loud). How our ...
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What is the maximum time difference to still associate an acoustic and visual event?
I am developing a game where the music needs to be synchronized to the actual game logic. That means that some objects in the game react to events in the music. Of course, the music will never be ...
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Increasing pitch perception of the same auditory stimuli
I was trying to work up a small clip of repeating beep sounds I recorded from a mobile game. This series of sounds, when played, gave an unmistakable perception of increasing pitch with every ...
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Any link between IQ and a person's ability to create or mimic sounds?
Reading some articles about animals and speech, and it just brushes a bit of the neurology of it, but that got me curious:
Is there any link between a person's (or an animal's) mimicry skill and/or ...
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Can people with absolute pitch identify the exact frequency, or simply the pitch class?
Absolute pitch can be defined as the ability to identify or re-create a given musical note without the benefit of a reference tone.
When people claim to have absolute pitch, does this mean they have ...
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What is the effect of gradual increase of speech speed on speech comprehension?
When I am watching a YouTube video with normal speed I can understand everything with no problem. When I speed up the video to 1.25x my understanding of what someone is saying is a bit worse, but ...
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Hearing Loss and Potentially hearing more
I've been diagnosed since I was younger (2nd grade) with a hearing impairment. Basically the nerve hairs on my cochlea are burned and I don't pick up 70% of the frequencies around me in my right ear.
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How to test whether a person is Left-Eared or Right-Eared?
It is well-known that the majority of humans have left-right preferences when using their hands or feet. But it is perhaps less well-known that the same can be true for our eyes and ears.
I once ...
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Research on the van Norden percept
What are the latest research and explanations concerning this auditory effect? I haven't managed to turn up much on the net, so just to check that I've named it correctly, my experience of it was ...
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What are the brain regions related to tinnitus shown in this figure?
I am interested in learning about the neural mechanisms behind tinnitus, and was wondering if someone could help me to name the parts of the brain on the image below from a site of the University ...
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Why can good music raise goosebumps?
Listening to really good music right now, I was wondering why it raises goosebumps.
Is there any physiological reason for this reaction to specific wavelengths or something?
Due sometimes strong ...
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Is there a difference between hearing and decoding the sound?
I presume that deafness is the inability of hearing any sounds. And I presume that it may also be possible to be less able to decode sounds. In other words, an inability to translate or understand the ...
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Dichotic listening tasks and crosstalk
In a dichotic listening task where participants listen to different (frequency-wise) musical tones through headphones, is cross talk to the contralateral cochlea of each ear through bone conduction a ...
