Music Appreciation and the Auditory System :: Biology Essays Research Papers

Music Appreciation and the Auditory SystemHave you invariably come home after an exhausting day and turned on music to relax your nerves? While you are taking it easy, your auditory pallium is not. It works hard to synthesize the several musical elements of rhythm, pitch, frequency, and timbre to create a rich auditory experience. First, a discussion of the ear physiology is needed. Vibrating air despicable at diametrical frequencies hits the eardrum which causes the middle ears three bones to move accordingly. The stapes, one of these intimate ear bones hits on the oval window of the inner ear, and because the inner ear is filled with fluid, the bulging of the oval window causes this fluid to slosh around. The round window, also in the inner ear, compensates for the increased pressure by bulging outward. The inner ear has two functions, to transduce sound via the cochlea and to maintain a persons vertical position with respect to gravity via the vestibular system (1). . exactly here, we pass on only consider the transduction of sound. The cochlea is filled with hair cells that are extremely sensitive and depolarize with only slight perturbations of the inner ear fluid. At the stop consonant of depolarization, a neural signal is transmitted and on its way to the brain. This nerve impulse travels to the auditory nerve (8th cranial nerve), passes through the brainstem, and then reaches the branched form of the cochlear nucleus the ventral cochlear nucleus or the abaxial cochlear nucleus. The nerve signal that passes through the ventral cochlear nucleus will reach the superior olive in the medulla where differences in timing and loudness of sound are compared, and location of the sounds origin is pinpointed (1). The nerve signal that crosses the dorsal cochlear nucleus ultimately is analyzed for sound quality.As seen in the final step of sound transduction, the education relayed by the neural signal branches and touch on occurs at different sights. No co nsensus has been reached as to where music is processed in the brain. Most researchers agree that the different components of music are processed in different parts of the brain, as exemplified by the branching pathway of the cochlear nucleus which facilitates the separation of sound timing and loudness with the sound quality analysis. But this information is not sufficient to answer the question of where our sense of music originates.Frackwiak has supplied a small part of the puzzle.