Peripheral Coding of Auditory Information
Davis Hallowell · The MIT Press eBooks · 2012
This chapter discusses what, for many years, has been considered a dominant problem of auditory theory, which is the determination of how the physical dimensions of the monaural acoustic stimulus, namely, frequency and intensity, are coded in the form of all-or-none impulses, separated by silent intervals and traveling in a large number of parallel, insulated channels. A second problem, which has attracted more and more attention in recent years, has been the coding of the information that forms the basis of sensing the direction from which sound arrives. Binaural differences in time become very important in this problem. Before discussing these problems, the chapter starts with an overview of the auditory nerve in mammals and the function of its parts.