Re: Eardrum

["John S. Denker" <jsd@MONMOUTH.COM>]

On 04/11/2003 07:03 AM, David Abineri wrote:
> The question as to what the resonant frequency of a human ear drum might
> be came up in my class yesterday.

Searching like this:
http://www.google.com/search?q=tympanic-membrane+mass+restoring-force

turns up things like this:
http://funsan.biomed.mcgill.ca/~funnell/AudiLab/damp86.html

NOTE:  This makes contact with the recent thread on
"finding things on the internet".

Finding this requires some nontrivial searching.
 -- Searching for resonance doesn't work as well as
    searching for nitty-grittier physics terms such
    as mass and restoring-force.  In particular, searching
    on resonance is risky because it presumes that the
    system is resonant.
 -- Searching for eardrum doesn't work as well as
    searching for tympanic-membrane

==================================================
On 04/11/2003 07:46 AM, Karl Trappe wrote:
> Pediatricians are taught that the resonant frequency of the ear
> *exactly matches* the cry of a baby.  Think about it, and it makes
> good biophysics sense.

On what planet is that?  This brings new meaning to the
concept of "exactly".

Where I come from, neither ears nor cries are narrowband.

Searching on:
http://www.google.com/search?q=baby+cry+spectrogram

Leads immediately to:
http://www.clarku.edu/research/access/psychology/thompson/sound.html

which is about as wideband as anything you're ever going
to see.