The sense of hearing is very important for a voice over sydney artist. Here is some information on how the sense of hearing works.
Often considered the most important sense for humans, hearing allows us to communicate with each other by receiving sounds and interpreting speech.
Voice over Sydney: Sound Waves
Sound waves are collected by the external ear — the pinna and the external auditory canal — and funneled to the tympanic membrane (eardrum) to make it vibrate. Attached to the tympanic membrane, the malleus (hammer) transmits the vibration to the incus (anvil), which passes the vibration on to the stapes (stirrup). Hair cells convert the mechanical vibration to electrical signals, which in turn excite the 30,000 fibers of the auditory nerve. The auditory nerve then carries the signals to the brainstem. From there, nerve fibers send the information to the auditory cortex, the part of the brain involved in perceiving sound.
Hearing also gives information vital to survival; for instance, by alerting us to an approaching car, it enables us to get out of harm’s way.
Voice over Sydney: How hearing works
Like the visual system, our hearing system picks up several qualities in the signals it detects (for example, a sound’s location, its loudness, and its pitch). Our hearing system does not blend the frequencies of different sounds, as the visual system does when different wavelengths of light are mixed to produce color. Instead, it separates complex sounds into their component tones or frequencies so that we can follow different voices or instruments as we listen to conversations or to music.
Voice over Sydney: The Mechanism of Hearing
Whether from the chirping of crickets or the roar of a rocket engine, sound waves are collected by the external ear — the pinna and the external auditory canal — and funneled to the tympanic membrane (eardrum) to make it vibrate. Attached to the tympanic membrane, the malleus (hammer) transmits the vibration to the incus (anvil), which passes the vibration on to the stapes (stirrup). The stapes pushes on the oval window, which separates the air-filled middle ear from the fluid-filled inner ear to produce pressure waves in the inner ear’s snail-shaped cochlea. The separation of frequencies occurs in the cochlea, which is tuned along its length to different frequencies, so that a high note causes one region of the cochlea’s basilar membrane to vibrate, while a lower note has the same effect on a different region of the basilar membrane.
