How physics will make earphones less painful

As most people live , a few hours of having an ear bud in their ear leaves them sore and ineffective to listen any longer . scientist have visualise out what happens during ‘ listener fatique , ’ and designed pump - activity ear buds that can lick the problem . recover out how you’re able to rock and roll all night , and company every day .

Sounds are nothing more than pressure waves in the air . When they hit the spike , they move around down through the ear canal and knock into the ear membranophone . This is a membrane – like the top of a metal drum – that vibrate as the pressure Wave hit it . That vibration is passed down , through a serial of tiny bones , farther into the capitulum , to the cochlea . The cochlea is a spiraling space , filled with fluid and lined with hairs . The vibration hits the fluid , the hair move , and their drive triggers electric signals that finally make it to the brain and permit us know that we ’re listen to our Star Wars ringtone again , and we want to break up up the earpiece .

In hypothesis , it should n’t matter whether we ’re listening to sound a thousand mi off or wedge in our ear . In practice , we can listen to the far - away go all 24-hour interval without discomfort , while a relatively short span of take heed to an auricle bud or a hearing economic aid leaves listeners huffy . scientist thought that the audio was overdraw in the capitulum , or that there was some kind of electric problem with the machine . It change by reversal out , the trouble was the structure of the audio equipment , and the physical response of the intimate spike . When the ear is block off by an ear bud , a certain sleeping accommodation between the gadget and the capitulum thrum . This chamber , with its deficiency of any form of pressure - release , increases vibrations intensely .

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The ear respond to what it perceives as a tacky dissonance by engaging the acoustic reflex . lilliputian muscles rive even tinier ivory aside from the ear tympan , so that it has to resonate more dramatically to get the same signal across . Other midget muscles pull other bone away from the cochlea , further dampening the signal . The sound is made softer , and the listener turns up the mass even more . This massive amount of insistence on the capitulum metal drum , and the weariness of the muscle involved in the acoustic answer , causes annoyance in the inner spike ; listener ’s tiredness .

There are a couple of purgative fixes for the problem . Both of them require demand some of the pressure off of the ear get up by building oscillating roadblock between it and the origin of the sound . This problem , the waterproofing of the auricle , has caused problems in the past for citizenry with hearing aids . Humans are used to hearing their own voice a certain way because it reverberates through their heads . This is one of the reasons we ’re so appalled when we hear ourselves on recording gadget . The voice we hear is n’t the one that ’s reaching other people . When a portion of the ear is seal off , a person ’s own voice sound muffled . This is why some people with hear aids spill the beans loud . They ca n’t hear themselves correctly , even if they have no trouble take heed anyone else . engineer have relieved the pressure by drilling holes in the auditory sense aid , but often this lead to the wearer hearing squeak and squeals as air travel speed through the hole . Since a somebody with headphone does n’t need to hear their own voice , scientists propose sealing off those holes , not with solid plastic , but with a whippy plastic film barrier that provides a buffer store between the sound and the ear barrel .

Another design is a little more high - technical school . locomotive engineer need to examine sending the earbud down the pinna canal with its own little inflatable balloon . The balloon will billow to fill the capitulum canal by pairing the outward-bound flow of press from the speaker in the bud with a trap to take in inwards flow air outside the sound port . Once the balloon is blow up , it will do the same thing as the film . It will plunge some of the atmospheric pressure that would otherwise batter the capitulum drum and make the acoustical unconditioned reflex to kick in . ( And people thought pump were going to be limited to stool pigeon in the nineties . )

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