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ISH 2025: SPSC Presents Outer Hair Cell Model with Chaotic Dynamics

Published
Tue, Jul 01, 2025
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At the International Symposium of Hearing (ISH) 2025, Sebastian Handel, Martin Hagmüller, and Gernot Kubin presented a study on a computational model of outer hair cells (OHC). They investigated how introducing chaotic dynamics into the model can lead to time-frequency resolution comparable to that observed in the human auditory system.

Their approach indicates that the OHC behavior is similar to that of a nonlinear oscillator. Furthermore, they find that this chaotic behavior only occupies a narrow frequency band; therefore, it is referred to as narrowband chaos. This could be a crucial property because these oscillators continuously oscillate even without a stimulus, leading to an audible sound. If an ensemble of these oscillators is considered, where every oscillator shows narrowband chaos at a different frequency band, they would sum up to a broadband noise signal, which is much easier to suppress.

If you are interested in this topic, stay tuned for the upcoming paper!