Auditory Transduction (2002)

This 7-minute video by Brandon Pletsch takes viewers on a step-by-step voyage through the inside of the ear, to the acoustic accompaniment of classical music. Pletsch, a former medical illustration student at the Medical College of Georgia, first built a physical ear model and mapped which frequency ranges hit which parts of the inner ear. He then created digital renderings of each part of the hearing pathway using several software packages. A narrator describes how the sound waves travel through each portion of the ear, and how hair cells translate the vibrations they induce into nerve impulses.