The ability to hear the pitch of a sound is important, not only for music appreciation, but also for listening to speech, especially in noisy environments.

The brain is as important as the ear for hearing. In addition to receiving and interpreting sound signals that have been converted by the inner ear into electrical impulses, the brain also sends signals back to earlier stages in the hearing pathway. One such stage is the brainstem – between the inner ear and the mid-brain – is thought to control the amplification of sounds in the inner ear.

Deafness Research UK recently awarded a scholarship to Salma Mahmood, an audiology student at Aston University, to study the way in which the brain processes echoes. The work, carried out with Dr Bernhard Seeber at Nottingham's MRC Institute of Hearing Research, is important for understanding how we localize sounds indoors.

Deafness Research UK is delighted to be teaming up with the Royal Philharmonic Society, Classic FM and a number of other prestigious partners for a major new cultural and educational initiative for 2008.

Following successful previews in 2007, The Bionic Ear Show 2008 opens in Brighton at the end of February.

To hear, do you need your brain? Or your ears? What happens when parts of the ear go wrong and why do people go deaf as they age? How can we fix these problems? Would you still be able to hear if we artificially replaced every part of your ear?

Why is the cochlea in our ears shaped like a spiral? According to new work by scientists in the US, the spiral shape makes us more sensitive to low frequency sounds.

A Deafness Research UK researcher, working as part of an international collaboration, has established one of the genes responsible for the development of the sensory regions in the inner ear, which include the hair cells that detect sound.

Scientists at the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) report that they have discovered some key mechanisms underlying how stereocilia - the tiny hair-like projections jutting from the top surface of hair cells - develop to form their characteristic architecture.