Each inner hair cell responds best to one frequency plus a widening critical band

Evidence

Frequency selectivity is commonly thought to stem from cochlear processing; a broadband stimulus arriving at the cochlea is converted using mechanical and neural processing into a neural output. Each of the inner hair cells has a different best frequency to which it responds, but they also respond strongly to frequencies near the best frequency. This frequency region is called the critical band or the auditory filter. In practice, the width of this band, which depends on frequency, is of interest in sound and voice technologies. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 1030

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the critical band / auditory filter concept and traces it to cochlear hair-cell tuning.
• XREF: Critical band concept underpins psychoacoustic audio coding (MP3 masking) and speech intelligibility models — directly relevant to the reader’s acoustic-communication applications goal.