BAS Message
March 2018

1. V39N4 of the BAS Speaker has been published..It features “On “Vacuum Tubes—Then and Now” by Brian Geyer and CEDIA show reports. There is a writeup of the meeting with JansZen Electrostatics and David Janszen by David Hadaway. David Weinberg writes on UltraHD andHDR video.

2. Our eardrums move in sync with our eyes

Researchers at Duke University have been using microphones inserted into people's ears to study how their eardrums change during saccades – the movement that occurs when we shift visual focus from one place to another.. They were used the microphones to detect changes in ear canal pressure that were probably caused by middle-ear muscles tugging on the eardrum.

These pressure changes indicate that when we look left, for example, the drum of our left ear gets pulled further into the ear and that of our right ear gets pushed out, before they both swing back and forth a few times.

They may prepare our ears to ear sound from a particular direction..

The changes to the eardrums began as early as 10 milliseconds before the eyes started to move.

One theory is that it helps the brain make sense of what we see and here.

They could imagine a mechanism being incorporated into hearing aids that picks up signals of eyes moving to a new location and tries to amplify the sound at that location..

[I wonder if tensioning the eardrum raises its resonant frequency and thus enhances the sensitivity to high frequency pitches which are important in sensing directionality] New Scientist 29Jl17.


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updated 3/17/18