Auditory system

The auditory system is the sensory system for the sense of hearing. It includes both the sensory organs (the ears) and the auditory parts of the sensory system.

Peripheral auditory system

The auditory periphery, starting with the ear, is the first stage of the transduction of sound in a hearing organism. While not part of the nervous system, its components feed directly into the nervous system, performing mechanoeletrical transduction of sound pressure waves into neural action potentials.

Outer ear

The folds of cartilage surrounding the ear canal are called the pinna. Sound waves are reflected and attenuated when they hit the pinna, and these changes provide additional information that will help the brain determine the direction from which the sounds came.

The sound waves enter the auditory canal, a deceptively simple tube. The ear canal amplifies sounds that are between 3 and 12 kHz. At the far end of the ear canal is the tympanic membrane, which marks the beginning of the middle ear.