This is Scientific American's 60-second Science, I'm Christopher Intagliata.Certain concert venues, like Boston's Symphony Hall, are known to beautifully reflect the sounds of an orchestra.It turns out there's a similar process at play in your cochlea, deep inside your ear―where a tiny bony cavity houses the organ that allows you to hear."It's like its own tiny little acoustics chamber, if you will.So anything and everything you hear is going into our ear and then going into this little bony chamber."Mike Gordon, a psychologist at William Paterson University in New Jersey.But while studying this process, he also found there's actually a lot of variability in the way people hear.Some frequencies can appear tens of decibels louder or quieter than average―based on the resonant properties of a person's skull."We were shocked. My first version of the draft had exclamation points all over the place, but we eventually removed those from the final copy."First, Gordon's team gave 30 volunteers a hearing test―the standard type, where different frequencies of tones are played at varying loudness.Then they did a "bone conduction" hearing test, where vibrations are transmitted directly onto the skull, from behind the ear.Finally, they projected white noise like this...... through the skull, from behind the ear, and recorded what came out at the forehead. This is that white noise...... filtered through Gordon's skull:With those filtered samples, they were able to see the unique spectral fingerprints each volunteer's skull left on the white noise,
这里是科学美国人――60秒科学系列，我是克里斯托弗・因塔格里塔。波士顿交响音乐厅等音乐会场地，以能完美地反射管弦乐队的声音而闻名。结果表明，你耳朵深处的耳蜗中也发生着类似的过程，那里有微型骨腔，容纳着让我们听到声音的器官。“如果你愿意这样说的话，它就像自已的小型声乐室。你听到的任何声音都会进入耳内，然后进入这个小骨室。”新泽西州威廉・帕特森大学的心理学家迈克・戈登说到。但在研究这一过程的同时，他还发现，人们的听觉方式实际上有很多变化。根据个人头骨的共振特性，有些频率会比平均值高或低数十分贝。“我们非常震惊。我的初稿到处都是感叹号，但我们的终稿最终删除了这些感叹号。”首先，戈登的研究团队让30名志愿者进行了一项听力测试――这是一种标准的听力测试，以不同音量播放不同频率的音调。然后，他们做了一个“骨传导”听力测试，振动直接从耳朵后面传到头骨上。最后，他们像这样播放白噪音，让声音从耳朵后面通过头骨，并记录下从前额传出的声音。这就是白噪音……通过戈登头骨后的声音通过这些过滤后的样本，他们能够看到每名志愿者留在白噪音上的头内独特光谱指纹，
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