Alien analogues to the vertebrate ear?
How could an auditory organ perceive sound waves with a completely different anatomy from the vertebrate ear (e.g. canal, typanum, bones) at the same effectiveness?
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1 answer
Possibly by detecting resonance on a membrane through nerve signals.
Sound is vibrations in the air, and when those waves run into things you get vibrations.
Human skin is sensitive to sound to some extent, especially low frequencies.
If the aliens membrane had a lot of nerves running through it, it could be pretty sensitive to vibrations at higher frequencies. This is similar to the human tympanum, but any structure designed to detect sound vibrations is going to work in a similar way, and so parallel evolution is to be expected.
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