ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the workings of the marvelous ear, to reveal the mechanisms in the auditory system that enable people to hear the musically salient aspects of sound. It deals with an examination of pitch, loudness, duration, and timbre as the four dominant perceptual properties of the heard sounds from which music emerges as an auditory experience. The chapter describes the main structures of the ear and the pathways leading from the ear to the brain. How do the ears and the relevant parts of the nervous system extract these features of sound? The perceptual experience of pitch is related to the frequency of vibrations in sounds. The ability to perceive pitch thus relies on the ear's ability to encode frequencies from physical stimuli. Another important concept related to pitch perception, motivated by physiology but grounded in behavioral studies, is the critical bandwidth.
