Demonstration of a Hydraulic Model of the Cochlea having a Soft Partition Lengthwise

Abstract

I introduce fundamental facts requiring explanation: First: Giuseppe Tartini in 1704 discovered that, when two musical tones were presented to it, the sense organ not only gave him the musical interval but added one or more bass tones, which he named terbi suoni. In 1954, Max F. Meyer extended this discovery over nonmusical intervals and also showed that the terzi suoni failed to deserve the Helmholtzian term “difference” tones. Example: For the interval 19:13, the terzi suoni are the frequencies 7 and 3, by no means 6. Second: About 1830, Rudolf Koenig made known the remarkable fact that in all mistuned consonances the beats of the higher and those of the lower pitch were never heard at random times: they always strictly alternated. Third: To this, Carl Stumpy in 1895 added the discovery that the beats of 1:2 and 3:2 (because odd:even) mistuned by “d” came at the rate of “2d,” i.e., were doubled.—The demonstrated model prescribes the fruitless place theory and offers a mechanism by which all those facts of audition are explainable as heard frequencies.