NONLINEAR DYNAMICS OF COCHLEAR INFORMATION PROCESSING

The nonlinear amplification process in the mammalian cochlea gives rise to a variety of phenomena, which manifest as two-tone suppression and combination tone generation. These nonlinear effects show that, besides mere mechanical-to-neural transduction, the cochlea performs significant information processing on a biophysical, pre-neural level. As nonlinear cochlear processing is a precondition for successful feature extraction at higher neural stages, its profound understanding is of interest for the design of intelligent acoustic sensors. In this contribution, we provide a thorough explanation of suppression and combination tone generation, where we rely on Hopftype cochlear amplifiers. The underlying cochlear model can be implemented as an electronic circuit.