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Can you hear sound

Updated: 8/17/2019
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Cavycool

Lvl 1
12y ago

Best Answer

If one is not deaf one typically has the ability to hear sounds ranging from 20Hz to 20,000Hz.

Hearing (or audition) is one of the traditional five senses. It is the ability to perceive sound by detecting vibrations via an organ such as the ear. The inability to hear is called deafness.

In humans and other vertebrates, hearing is performed primarily by the auditory system: vibrations are detected by the ear and transduced into nerve impulses that are perceived by the brain (primarily in the temporal lobe). Like touch, audition requires sensitivity to the movement of molecules in the world outside the organism. Both hearing and touch are types of mechanosensation.

The answer to this question is not as obvious as it once was. Until a few hundred years ago, the definition of sound was "what we hear". Common sense allowed a little latitude, and allowance was made for distance and deafness, but we all knew what sound was.
And then the scientists stuck their oar in once again. Any builder of a church organ knew that if a pipe was made too long the noise started to sound like rapid bumps rather than a musical note, and if it was made too short nothing was heard. The physicists quickly realised that sound was variations in pressure in the air, and that the pitch of a note was simply determined by how many vibrations there were in each second. Too low and it wasn't musical; too high and it could be heard only by children, then dogs and then bats.
The scientists wrote papers, then engineers and inventors got in on the act. Now we generate ultrasonic waves at such a high pitch that no creature can hear them; when a pregnant woman has an ultrasound scan she sees her baby, but the only sound she hears is speech from the radiologist.

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12y ago
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