Analog electronic cochlea with mammalian hearing characteristics

Abstract

Systems close to bifurcations can be used as small-signal amplifiers. Biophysical measurements suggest that the active amplifiers present in the mammalian cochlea are systems close to a Hopf bifurcation. The pure tone and transient signal output of our electronic hearing sensor based on this observation provides output that is fully compatible with the electrophysiological data from the mammalian cochlea. In particular, it reproduces all salient nonlinear effects displayed by the cochlea.