Chapter 5: The Ear

1. Chapter 5: The Ear Kayla Daugherty Megan Schumacher Tyler Givens Makayla Lee

2. Amplitude vs. Frequency The strength or power of a wave signal is the amplitude of a sound wave, also determining its loudness. (The Height) Frequency determines the pitch that we experience. It is the number of times a wavelength occurs in a second. The frequency depends on the wavelength, the shorter the wavelength the higher the frequency. **A good way to remember the difference is to imagine your watching waves go by. Frequency would be how frequent they come by, if its fast they are in high frequency. The amplitude is just how tall the waves are. The taller the wave is, the louder it will be.

3. Middle Ear • The middle ear is the chamber between the eardrum and cochlea containing three tiny bones(hammer, anvil, and stirrup) that concentrate the vibrations of the eardrum on the cochlea’s oval window. Sound first travels to the eardrum causing it to vibrate, it is then passed through the hammer followed by the anvil and the stirrup before it arrives into the auditory tube that allows you to hear, known as the cochlea. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCyz8-eAs1I&feature=related

4. Cochlea • The cochlea is a coiled(snail shaped), bony, fluid-filled tube inside the inner ear through which sound waves trigger nerve impulses. The cochlea is lined with hair cells and the bending and moving of these tiny hairs is what senses the nerve impulses.

5. Conduction Hearing Loss • Conduction hearing loss occurs when something goes wrong with the system of conducting the sound to the cochlea. Example: My mother-in-law has a medical condition that is causing her stirrup to deteriorate slowly. Eventually she will need surgery to replace the bone in order to properly hear.

6. Sensorineural Hearing Loss • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpIptQSEEjY • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EJ4g3J6cJM&feature=related • Sensorineural Hearing Loss is otherwise known as nerve deafness. Damage to the cochlea’s hair cell receptors or their associated nerves can cause this. Occasionally, disease causes this nerve deafness, but more often the culprits are biological changes linked with heredity, aging, and prolonged exposure to ear splitting noise or music. Once this is destroyed, the tissues remain dead, but something like a cochlear implant will help amplify enough sound to stimulate neighboring hair cells.