Evear-Key · Patient education

How sound travels through the ear

A steady tone is followed from the air outside the head to the nerve fibres leaving the cochlea. Change the pitch to see where in the cochlear spiral that tone is actually detected — the reason two people can share the same ear and lose very different sounds.

Full pathway Cross-section of the human ear showing the pinna, ear canal, eardrum, malleus, incus and stapes, cochlea, semicircular canals and auditory nerve.
Pitch
Loudness
65 dB
Hearing
Reaching the brain
No hearing aid 100%
With hearing aid 100%
Follow the sound
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The whole journey

Sound energy — continuous wavefronts through air, bone and fluid Neural signal — discrete spikes on the nerve fibres Where this pitch is detected Blockage or hair-cell damage In-the-canal hearing aid

For patient education only. Timing and displacement are exaggerated so the movement is visible: the eardrum actually moves less than the width of a hydrogen atom at threshold, and a 1 kHz tone cycles a thousand times a second. Place-of-detection along the cochlea follows the standard tonotopic map — high pitches at the base, low pitches at the apex. Attenuation is drawn on a compressed scale so a 55 dB loss still leaves something visible on screen; in reality that signal would be far fainter than it looks here. The loss patterns are typical textbook examples, not any individual patient's audiogram.