"From Scratch: A complete dynamical system based model of the peripheral auditory system"

"Pitch is a complex hearing phenomenon that results from elicited and self-generated cochlear vibrations. Read-off vibrational information is relayed up the auditory pathway, where it is then condensed into pitch sensation. How this can adequately be described in terms of physics has largely remained an open question. We have developed a peripheral hearing system (in hardware and software) that reproduces with great accuracy all salient pitch features known from biophysical and psychoacoustic experiments. At the level of the auditory nerve, the system exploits stochastic resonance to achieve this performance, which may explain the large amount of noise observed in the working auditory nerve. The work is a rare example of how starting from a general principle of physics, biological processes can be understood, and, moreover, lean and efficient sensory designs can be achieved by navigating close to the biophysical example. This in contrast to often-taken reverse engineering approaches that focus on modeling the resulting signal rather than asking on what physical grounds the resulting signal dwells."