ABSTRACT
The comfort, safety and effective use of the human ear are the primary considerations motivating interest in the subject matter of this book; consequently, it is appropriate to describe that marvellous mechanism. The discussion will make brief reference to the external and the middle ears and extensive reference to the inner ear where the transduction process from incident sound to neural encoding takes place. This brief description of the ear will make extensive reference to Figure 2.1, and to published and unpublished work (Bies, 2001).
