How Does Sound Move Through My Ears?

Posted on by Augusta - Aiken ENT & Allergy

Whether you’re enjoying a quiet conversation at Trellis Coffee Bar or tuning in to a podcast on your daily walk, your ears are constantly processing different sounds. Let’s take a closer look at how your hearing system works and why taking care of it matters.

How the Hearing System Works

Senior man holding his hand to his ear, listening.

Your hearing system is a network of structures that translate invisible sound waves into signals your brain can understand. Here’s how the process works:

  1. Sound begins with vibration. When something makes a sound, like a phone ringing or a bird singing, it creates vibrations that travel through the air as sound waves.
  2. Your outer ear catches the waves. The part of your ear you can see (the pinna) acts like a funnel, capturing sound waves and directing them into your ear canal.
  3. The ear canal amplifies the sound. As the waves travel inward, the narrow canal helps boost their intensity slightly before reaching the eardrum.
  4. The eardrum vibrates. The sound waves cause the eardrum to vibrate. The vibrations move deeper into the middle ear.
  5. The ossicles amplify. The middle ear has three small bones—the malleus, incus and stapes (often called the hammer, anvil and stirrup). They amplify the vibrations and send them deeper into the ear.
  6. The vibrations enter the cochlea. The vibrations enter the spiral-shaped, fluid-filled organ in the inner ear, called the cochlea. The vibrations move the fluid, activating approximately 25,000 tiny hair-like cells.
  7. Hair cells create electrical signals. These hair cells convert the vibrations into electrical impulses.
  8. Your brain decodes the signal. The auditory nerve carries these impulses to your brain, which interprets them as meaningful sounds, like music, speech or laughter.

Your ears are built to handle a wide range of sounds, from the subtle rustle of leaves to the sharp ring of an alarm clock. But like any finely tuned system, they need care to function at their best. While the hearing process is automatic, factors like illness, injury, age-related changes and overexposure to loud noise can disrupt it, leading to hearing loss.

When to Get Your Hearing Checked

You don’t need to wait until something feels wrong to pay attention to your hearing. Routine hearing tests can detect changes early, even before you notice a problem.

Contact Augusta – Aiken ENT & Allergy today to schedule your hearing test with one of our specialists.