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- [Narrator] How are you
listening to this music right now?
(classical music)
Well you might know that your
speakers are creating sound
and your ears are listening to it.
But there is a lot more going on here.
You see all your speakers
are doing right now
is vibrating the particles
of the air close to it.
Then they vibrate the air
molecules close to them
and so on and so forth.
And we call this a sound wave.
And eventually when the air
molecules close to your ears
start vibrating, we hear sound.
But how does something as
boring as air molecules
going back and forth make us
experience something like this?
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Well, for that we need to
look at our ear carefully.
I mean the entire structure of the ear.
(classical music)
So let's look at how the
different parts of the ear
work together to make us experience sound.
So our ear can be
divided into three parts:
the outer ear, the middle
ear, and the inner ear.
The outer ear starts with the pinna.
It's the part you can see and touch.
Or in my case the part that my
mom would twist quite often.
It's job is to collect as
much sound waves as possible
and channel it into the auditory canal.
The sound waves pass
through the auditory canal
and eventually meet the ear drum.
Which is shown in green over here.
The ear drum is a transparent
membrane which is super
sensitive to the vibrations of the ear.
So as the air vibrates even
the ear drum starts vibrating.
Just like the skin of a drum.
And as you can, the ear drum
also separates the outer ear
from the middle ear.
This brings us to the middle ear.
The middle ear consists
of the three tiniest bones
of the human body.
And they're together the
are called the ossicles.
And they have pretty cool names.
They're called the malleus,
the incus, and stapes.
And here's the actual
picture of the three bones.
And because of their shapes,
they also commonly called
as the hammer, the anvil, and the stirrup.
The stirrup is where you
rest your feet when you
are riding your horse.
All right, so after the ear
drum vibrates you can see
the ossicles also start vibrating.
Transporting the vibrations
from the ear drums
to the inner ear.
Now their main job is to
increase or amplify the pressure
of the sound waves when
it reaches the inner ear.
But why do we need to
increase the pressure
of the sound wave?
Because as we will see, the
inner ear consists of a liquid
not air.
So the vibrations must
transfer into a liquid.
And you might already know that
vibrating or moving particles
of liquid is much harder
than moving particles of air.
Which is why it is very easy
for you to swing your arms
in the air but it is
pretty difficult to do that
inside water.
Let's say in a swimming pool.
And so to set this liquid in vibration,
the pressure has to be high enough.
And in fact, it turns out
that our ossicles increase
the pressure of the
sound about twenty times.
But how do they do that?
Well, just take a look at
the base of the stapes.
It has such a small area
compared to that of the ear drum.
So when the force gets
transferred from the ear drum
to the stapes it gets
concentrated in a very tiny area.
And you might know when you
concentrate force in a very
tiny area, you increase its' pressure.
And that brings us to the inner ear.
The inner ear consists
of a boney structure.
Which is shown in purple.
Now as you can see the
top part of this structure
consists of three semi-circular rings.
They help us in maintaining
our balance when walking
or dancing or whatever we do.
So they are not involved in hearing.
So not so important for us.
The part that is involved in hearing
is this snail like structure.
This is called the cochlea.
What does it do?
Well all those these
bones have already started
dancing to the music,
nothing gets heard until
these vibrations are
converted to electricity
and sent to our brain.
And that's exactly what the cochlea does.
Now the cochlea is super complex.
And it also a little mysterious.
Even today, there are
certain things about it
we just don't know.
And so we definitely
not go into the details.
But as mentioned earlier,
it contains a liquid.
And when the stirrup hits our cochlea,
this liquid starts vibrating.
And then there are some
specialized cells in the cochlea,
that convert these vibrations
into electrical signals.
And these electrical signals,
go through the auditory nerves
all the way to your brain.
Where it gets finally
interpreted as sound.
And the cells of your cochlea are amazing.
The electrical impulses that they generate
are super sensitive to
how loud the sound is
or how feeble the sound is.
Whether it is high
frequency or low frequency.
And as a result your brain
can differentiate the tiniest
differences in the sound.
And so you can understand
different letters or words.
Or even understand what
I am saying right now.
Or hear the different notes of this music.
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And so to summarize,
the outer ear collects
the sound waves through the pinna.
And directs them to the ear drums.
The three ossicle bones
of the middle ear amplify
this sound waves.
Transferring it into the cochlea.
And the cochlea converts the
back and forth vibrations
of the particles into electrical signals
and sends it to our brain.
And regardless of how many
words I use to describe
what's going on, the very
fact that the back and forth
movement of the air can be
converted into this amazing
experience we call sound,
is truly unfathomable and beyond words.
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