Research

Before we begin talking about whether gender influences your ability to hear higher or lower pitched sounds, you probably want to know how our ears hear noise. Our ears work like this: soundwaves travel through our ear into the eardrum (“How do we hear?”). Then they travel from the eardrum to the ossicles, or the inner ear. In the ossicles, there are little ear hairs that change the sound wave vibrations into electrical signals and send the electrical signals to your brain. Your brain then tells you the sound you are hearing (“How do we hear?”).

While I was explaining how our ears pick up noise, I mentioned something called the inner ear. You may be wondering what I mean by this, right? Well, there are many different parts of your ear: the outer ear, the middle ear, the inner ear, and the central auditory pathways (Connelly). The outer ear is made up of many different structures; the most common is the pinna. The pinna brings the direct sound down the ear canal. The pinna also improves the sound by using something called resonance characteristics. Most importantly, the pinna helps us figure out whether the sound is coming from in front of us or behind us. Another main part of your ear is the middle ear. The middle ear starts at you eardrum, a thin delicate part of your ear stretched throughout the inner end of your ear. The eardrum is what separates your middle ear from the environment around you. The eardrum is very delicate, but is still always working on changing the air pressure into something that your brain can handle. The next main part of your ear is the inner ear, which is separated into two sections, one that is used for balance and one that is used for hearing. The section for hearing is made up of two main parts called the cochlea and the auditory nerve. The last main part of your ear is the central auditory pathways, which is made up of many different structures. The Better Hearing Institute describes it as being “organized like circuits”, of both short and long structures making up the central auditory pathways (Connelly).

Now, we've been talking a lot about how our ears pick up sound. You may be wondering what sound is, right? Sound is actually a type of energy. This energy is made by a vibration that moves the air cells all around us. Once those vibrations get to you, that is when you begin to hear sound (“What makes sounds louder?”). Leonardo DaVinci, the Italian thinker and artist who created the Mona Lisa, actually created the idea of sound waves, or the vibrations that go through the air cells, as well. He created this idea around the year 1500 (“Who discovered the sound wave?”).

Ways in which we can tell the difference between sounds is by the pitch, the quality, and the intensity of the sound (Soffar). Sounds get pitch by the frequency of the sound waves that are being heard (Bäckman). Pitch is, in a way, like frequency. They are both measured by the amount of cycles per second, or cps. The most common unit of measurement is Hertz (Hz). Hertz and cycles per second are the same thing (“What is frequency?”). We measure the loudness of sound a different way. The loudness of sound can be measured in one of two ways, phon and sone (“What is frequency measured in?”). A phon is the same as an 1000 Hz tone. Phon is also a way to tell us if one sound is louder than another sound. Sone is a way of telling you how much louder one sound is compared to the loudness of another sound (Bethfernandezaud).

Now that you know a little bit more about sound, you may want to know a little bit about gender, which isn’t quite as complex as sound is.Chromosomes are what actually determine gender. Males are XY, females are XX (Naythias). While males and females are different genetically, the structure of their ears and how they hear are the same. There may be different sizes of ears, which may affect the amount of hair in people's ears which, in turn, could affect vibrations and frequency. This may result in people hearing differently. According to Patrick K. Sullivan, MD, the size of a person’s ear comes from the size of their head (Sullivan). Generally men have a bigger head than women, which could result in men having bigger ears (Sullivan).