> Would your inner ear change frequency range? Would > your brain even be able to interpret the sound if it > did?
As stated, vocal cords would shrink, allowing them to vibrate at a higher frequency. However, the cochlea is filled with tiny hairs of decreasing length, each with a different frequency it resonates at. In a shrunken person, each of those hairs would shrink, and like the vocal cords, have a different higher frequency response.
Given that both the vocal cords and the hairs in the cochlea are both of the same relative shape (i.e. strings), I suspect that the shift in frequency response would be the same, meaning a shrunken person's voice would still vibrate the same shrunken hairs.
What's more, since the nerves connected to those hairs are unchanged, the brain would perceive the incoming shrunken voice no different than if the speaker and listener hadn't been shrunken at all.
What would change is that the voices of normal people would now be at a frequency that was too low to vibrate any of the hairs in the shrunken person's ear making them inaudible.
> your brain even be able to interpret the sound if it
> did?
As stated, vocal cords would shrink, allowing them to vibrate at a higher frequency. However, the cochlea is filled with tiny hairs of decreasing length, each with a different frequency it resonates at. In a shrunken person, each of those hairs would shrink, and like the vocal cords, have a different higher frequency response.
Given that both the vocal cords and the hairs in the cochlea are both of the same relative shape (i.e. strings), I suspect that the shift in frequency response would be the same, meaning a shrunken person's voice would still vibrate the same shrunken hairs.
What's more, since the nerves connected to those hairs are unchanged, the brain would perceive the incoming shrunken voice no different than if the speaker and listener hadn't been shrunken at all.
What would change is that the voices of normal people would now be at a frequency that was too low to vibrate any of the hairs in the shrunken person's ear making them inaudible.