How your ear turns waves into music

Pressure waves enter the outer ear, vibrate the eardrum, are amplified by the three smallest bones in your body (hammer, anvil, stirrup), and finally hit the cochlea - a snail-shaped fluid-filled tube.

Inside the cochlea, tiny hair cells are tuned to different frequencies. High frequencies excite hair cells near the entrance; low frequencies travel deeper. Each cell fires a nerve impulse to the brain.

Your brain does the rest: pattern matching, source localization, language decoding, emotional reaction. By the time you 'hear' a song, your nervous system has done astonishing real-time signal processing.