OP
GrimSurfer
Major Contributor
- Joined
- May 25, 2019
- Messages
- 1,238
- Likes
- 1,484
- Thread Starter
- #41
I am, frankly, surprised by such a flippant response from somebody in the audio business. One doesn't have to think terribly hard to see where such research could be quite useful to the fields of acoustics and psychoacoustics.
Cadaver research produces useful findings on things like the natural resonance of an ear canal or eardrum to be measured. Post mortem is examination inner ear structures, which can tell researchers how the human ear works (beyond the macro tympanic membrane view). Destructive testing of tissue can determine its mechanical limits.
This kind of work was apparently useful enough for the Nobel Committee to grant a prize to Dr. Békésy in 1961.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3449028/
"One issue in all of Békésy’s work is his near exclusive use of unfixed cadaveric material. While this choice has a large impact on studies of inner ear mechanics, in which the gain of the cochlear amplifier has been lost, its impact on studies of the middle ear and other sound conduction paths is much smaller: The passive mechanical properties of tissues are not much altered by death, as long as the tissues are kept fresh and moist. Comparisons of multiple middle-ear mechanical measurements in collections of live-human and cadaveric ears show great similarities (Rosowski et al. 1990; Goode et al. 1996; Chen et al. 2009), and where they exist, there are generally significant similarities between modern results and Békésy’s."
"Some less-developed ideas of Bekesy’s are relevant to continued research today."
"Another approach to understanding BC [bone conduction] hearing is the use of finite element computational models. While these had previously been used for understanding structure-function relationships for the AC pathway, Bohnke and Arnold (2006) were the first to apply finite element methods to the study of BC. More recently, Homma et al. (2009) used a finite element model, validated against measurements from cadaver ears"
