Every time you put on some music or listen to a speaker’s words, you are party to a miracle of biology – the ability to hear. Sounds are just waves of pressure, cascading through sparse molecules of air. Your ears can not only detect these oscillations, but decode them to reveal a Bach sonata, a laughing friend, or a honking car.
This happens in three steps. First: capture. The sound waves pass through the bits of your ear you can actually see, and vibrate a membrane, stretched taut across your ear canal. This is the tympanum, or more evocatively, the eardrum. On the other side, the eardrum connects to three tiny well-named bones—the hammer, anvil and stirrup—which link the air-filled outer ear with the fluid-filled inner ear.
