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The University of Southampton
Engineering

The mechanics of the cochlea and its importance for our hearing Seminar

Time:
16:00 - 17:00
Date:
26 March 2019
Venue:
Building: 13 room: 3021

For more information regarding this seminar, please telephone Mrs Satwant Virdee on Ext 22277 or email s.virdee@soton.ac.uk .

Event details

ISVR seminar

Our hearing system is amazingly sensitive and selective, and to a large extent these abilities are due to the internal mechanics of the cochlea, which is part of the inner ear. The cochlear mechanics give rise to an acoustically-driven wave that travels to different positions along the cochlea at different frequencies, so that we can accurately discriminate different spectral components in the sounds that we hear. For quiet sounds, however, this passive frequency selectivity is enhanced by a distributed feedback mechanism that is known as the cochlear amplifier. This enhances the mechanical motion within the cochlea by a factor of more than 100, but the details of how these feedback loops interact with the mechanics of the cochlea are still not fully understood.

The ways in which changes in the cochlear mechanics might affect residual acoustic hearing after cochlear implant surgery will also be discussed. Cochlear implants were originally used to provide artificial electrical stimulation of the auditory nerves for profoundly deaf infants. These operations have been so successful that cochlear implants are now used to enhance the high frequency hearing in older patients, who still have some residual acoustic hearing at lower frequencies. This residual hearing is significantly degraded by the implantation process, however, and ways of potentially reducing this degradation by modifying the mechanics of the cochlea will be described.

Speaker information

Prof Steve Elliott ,Steve Elliott graduated with first class joint honours in physics and electronics from the University of London, in 1976, and received his PhD from the University of Surrey in 1979 for a dissertation on musical acoustics. He was appointed Lecturer at the Institute of Sound and Vibration Research (ISVR), University of Southampton, in 1982, was made Senior Lecturer in 1988, Professor in 1994, and served as Director of the ISVR from 2005 to 2010. His research interests have been mostly concerned with the connections between the physical world, signal processing and control, mainly in relation the active control of sound using adaptive filters and the active feedback control of vibration. This work has resulted in the practical demonstration of active control in propeller aircraft, cars and helicopters. His current research interests include modular systems for active feedback control and modelling the active processes within the cochlear. Professor Elliott has published over 250 papers in refereed journals and 500 conference papers and is co-author of Active Control of Sound (with P A Nelson 1992), Active Control of Vibration (with C R Fuller and P A Nelson 1996) and author of Signal Processing for Active Control (2001). He is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America, was jointly awarded the Tyndall Medal from the Institute of Acoustics in 1992 and the Kenneth Harris James Prize from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in 2000. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2009

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