This Is Your Ear Hearing This Song

This Is Your Ear Hearing This Song - This is your organ of Corti, inside the cochlea of your inner ear, decoding every note of this music in real time. Each glowing cell is a hair cell. High pitches move the cells near the base of the spiral, and low pitches travel all the way to the tip. Every part of the organ in this animation is driven by the exact pitch it would respond to in a real ear, so what you see follows the music as it plays. For visual purposes, the hair cells are enlarged and reduced in number. The animation shows 300, while a real human ear has about 15,000. This project was built as a code-driven simulation, combining manual 3D work with generative methods. The music was analysed note by note and mapped onto the cochlea’s natural frequency layout. Coming soon: an interactive simulator where you can play your own sounds and watch how they move the hair cells.