Nursery World - All ears

Do the children in your club notice the birds singing? Philip Waters shows you how they can listen carefully. the human ear is a complex and fascinating sensory organ. Like ourother senses, our hearing, or audition, is highly adaptive - it enables us to hear sounds from the faintest of whispers to the collective cacophony of a playing orchestra, from the hum of a bee to the boom of an aeroplane passing through the sound barrier. It is a remarkable sound-catching device.

the human ear is a complex and fascinating sensory organ. Like ourother senses, our hearing, or audition, is highly adaptive - it enables us to hear sounds from the faintest of whispers to the collective cacophony of a playing orchestra, from the hum of a bee to the boom of an aeroplane passing through the sound barrier. It is a remarkable sound-catching device.

Despite the ability to hear such a wide range of sounds, humans tend to hear best those sounds the frequencies of which lie within the range of the human voice. This would partly explain our ability to detect the differences among thousands of human voices and instantly recognise the voice of almost anyone we know. This recognition is partly the mechanical responsibility of our brain's interpretation of sound waves detected in the ear, but is also part of our brain's ability to distinguish between useful, or needy sounds from that of background noise.

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