Music Cognition Unit 1: The Auditory System

Amplitude

Intensity of air pressure. It is a measurable item and our brains then convert this into how loud or soft something is.

frequency

(Hz) Cycles per second. Human hearing is 20-20,000Hz. The brain understands that as pitch

Fundamental Frequency

100 Hz

Harmonics

Integer multiples of the fundamental frequency. They shape timbre.

Pinna

Outer Ear

Function: Collects the sound waves and goes through the ear canal

Ear Drum:

Very thin because it needs to vibrate between 20-20,000 Hz. It makes the sound waves turn into complex waves by vibrating at the frequency

Ossicles:

They transform the vibrations into mechanical energy. When the ear drum pushes towards them, the little bones will pop out.

Eustachian Tube

Any water that gets in your ear drains there through your throat and you don’t notice it.

Hair Cells

Our sensory nerves, without them we can’t hear. They tilt and push the basilar membrane giving signals

Adaptation

A decline in neural response of the sensory cell (hair cell firing) over time to repeated presentation of the same stimulus

Habituation:

The tendency of the brain to stop attending to constant information (learned behavior)

Frequency Following Response (FFR)

Allows us to see the impact of top-down processing on fidelity of coding. Originates from the auditory brainstem. (inferior colliculus). Encodes the energy of the stimulus fundamental frequency (fº)

Auditory Brainstem Response (ABR)

Brainstem response captures both bottom-up and top-down processes

Auditory Imagery

A form of mental imagery in which individuals can voluntarily imagine sounds, and report hearing them in the absence of external stimulation

Auditory Objects

A perceptual construct that is a result of the auditory system’s ability to detect, extract, segregate, and group the spectrotemporal regularities into stable perceptual unites.