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6.1.1: Learning Objectives and Introduction

  • Page ID
    224941
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    Learning Objectives
    • Describe the basic auditory attributes of sound.
    • Describe the structure and general function of the auditory pathways from the outer ear to the auditory cortex.
    • Discuss ways in which we are able to locate sounds in space.
    • Describe various acoustic cues that contribute to our ability to perceptually segregate simultaneously arriving sounds.

    Introduction

    Hearing forms a crucial part of our everyday life. Most of our communication with others, via speech or music, reaches us through the ears. Indeed, a saying, often attributed to Helen Keller, is that blindness separates us from things, but deafness separates us from people. The ears respond to acoustic information, or sound—tiny and rapid variations in air pressure. Sound waves travel from the source and produce pressure variations in the listener’s ear canals, causing the eardrums (or tympanic membranes) to vibrate. This module provides an overview of the events that follow, which convert these simple mechanical vibrations into our rich experience known as hearing, or auditory perception.

    little boy talking to girl .png

    Hearing provides us with our most important connection to the people around us. [Image: Bindaas Madhavi, https://goo.gl/Sv6TtR, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0, https://goo.gl/62XJAl]


    Hearing by Andrew J. Oxenham is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available in our Licensing Agreement.


    This page titled 6.1.1: Learning Objectives and Introduction is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Michael Miguel.