The articles in this volume are the results of discussions among biophysicists, neurobiologists and mathematicians with research interests in auditory mechanics and signal processing. The topics covered include: mechanics and models of hearing organs; auditory periphery and its models; middle ear; traveling wave and cochlear amplifier; emissions; outer hair cell; electromotility; central auditory processing; auditory nerve responses; and hearing in non-mammals.

The workshop brought together experts in genetics, molecular and cellular biology, physiology, engineering, physics, mathematics, audiology and medicine to present current work and to review the critical issues of inner ear function. A special emphasis of the workshop was on analytical model based studies. Experimentalists and theoreticians thus shared their points of view. The topics ranged from consideration of the hearing organ as a system to the study and modeling of individual auditory cells including molecular aspects of function. Some of the topics in the book are: motor proteins in hair cells; mechanical and electrical aspects of transduction by motor proteins; function of proteins in stereocilia of hair cells; production of acoustic force by stereocilia, mechanical properties of hair cells and the organ of Corti; mechanical vibration of the organ of Corti; wave propagation in tissue and fluids of the inner ear; sound amplification in the cochlea; critical oscillations; cochlear nonlinearity, and mechanisms for the production of otoacoustic emissions. This book will be invaluable to researchers and students in auditory science.

This book describes how human hearing works and how to build machines that analyze sounds in the same way that people do.

In the summer of 2006, the 5th International Symposium on Middle Ear Mechanics in Research and Otology was held at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. More than 250 participants from 33 countries in all five continents came together to present their most current research results, exchange their knowledge in practical applications, to discuss open questions and discover new unsolved problems.This book includes representative, peer-reviewed articles of the lectures and papers presented during the symposium, and thereby gives an overview of the ongoing research and current knowledge in the function and mechanics of the normal, diseased and reconstructed middle ear. It covers basic research, engineering and clinical aspects of evaluation, diagnosis and surgery of the middle ear as well as implantable hearing devices in a very broad and interdisciplinary way. Following the tradition of the organizers of the previous conferences to collect the contributions of the symposium, this volume further initialized and promotes many fruitful discussions on middle ear mechanics with different points of view.

Loudness is the primary psychological correlate of intensity. When the intensity of a sound increases, loudness increases. However, there exists no simple one-to-one correspondence between loudness and intensity; loudness can be changed by modifying the frequency or the duration of the sound, or by adding background sounds. Loudness also changes with the listener’s cognitive state. Loudness provides a basic reference for graduate students, consultants, clinicians, and researchers with a focus on recent discoveries. The book begins with an overview of the conceptual thinking related to the study of loudness, addresses issues related to its measurement, and later discusses the physiological effects of loud sounds, reaction times and electrophysiological measures that correlate with loudness. Loudness in the laboratory, loudness of steady-state sounds and the loudness of time-varying sounds are also covered, as are hearing loss and models.

The field of cochlear mechanics has received an increasing interest over the last few decades. In the majority of these studies the researchers use linear systems analysis or linear approximations of the nonlinear (NL) systems. Even though it has been clear that the intact cochlea operates nonlinearly, lack of tools for proper nonlinear analysis, and widely available tools for linear analysis still lead to inefficient and possibly incorrect interpretation of the biophysics of the cochlea. An example is the presumption that a change in cochlear stiffness at hair cell level must account for the observed change in tuning (or frequency mapping) due to prestin application. Hypotheses like this need to be addressed in a tutorial that is lucid enough to analyze and explain basic differences. Cochlear Mechanics presents a useful and mathematically justified/justifiable approach in the main part of the text, an approach that will be elucidated with clear examples. The book will be useful to scientists in auditory neuroscience, as well as graduate students in biophysics/biomedical engineering.