Subject: Re: Traveling waves or resonance? From: Eckard Blumschein <Eckard.Blumschein(at)E-Technik.Uni-Magdeburg.DE> Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 11:03:51 +0200Still facing ingratitude from Christian who won his quarrel on autocorrelation together with Peter, I do not expect much consent with Martin if I take up Dick's mention of critical bandwidth coinciding with width of Tianying Ren's traveling wave. The reason for me to do so is my curiosity how many such local traveling waves might exist at a time. Inspired from recorded AN patterns, I tend to imagine up to 15 TWs forming a fairly coarse but frequency-analog bar code. Spectrograms can show too many lines. Spectral resolution is limited. Does it really make sense to defend the old models of just one hydromechanical long traveling wave transmitting energy from base to apex? All of the presumably up to 15 local cochlear amplifiers are electrically powered. I tried to interpret the phenomenon of travel inside a standing envelope of less than 1 mm width like an advantage because it provides bandwidth for subsequent cepstral analysis after downsampling. Given, there is not much evidence for the waves suggested by Andrew, and Martin's idea of resonant hair cells is also not yet the whole story, then Andrew and Martin nonetheless deserve high appreciation for pointing at some weakness of the traditional models. What about the discrepancy between a wide frequency range of hearing and less varying stiffness and width of BM, David Mountain did perhaps not yet distinguish between the range of hearing (down to about 20 Hz) and the range of CF (down to about 100 Hz). While I suggest to finally abandon all long-wave and transmission-line models, my favorite for the traveling wave within a narrow standing envelope is based on what I read from Ren, Russell, Mountain, Dallos, and many others. Eckard