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Blow It Out Your Ear Germany's PTB (Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt), the national institute for natural and engineering sciences and the highest technical authority for metrology (the science of measurement), recently discovered that our inner ears make their own sounds. In fact, they appear to naturally be tuned to major scales. What gives your ears the ability to make their own tones are properties of sound waves and how they interact with the hair cells of the inner ear. A healthy ear that is exposed to two upper tones of a major triad chord (eg. E and G in the C major chord) will, by itself, create the third, lowest, tone of the chord. The two tones cause the ear to vibrate at the third frequency, creating the lower tone which actually comes out of the ear and has been measured by PTB with a highly sensitive microphone.

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