Speaker
Description
Over the past decades, numerous models of the cochlear partition have been proposed to explain key features of cochlear mechanics, including traveling waves, nonlinear amplification, and compressive responses. Among them, the transmission-line model introduced by Geoffrey Zweig and extended by others represents the cochlea as a distributed system of coupled resonant elements interacting through the cochlear fluid and successfully reproduces the spatiotemporal dynamics of the basilar membrane. Another widely used framework describes active auditory processes as nonlinear oscillators operating near a Hopf bifurcation. The Stuart–Landau oscillator (SLO), the normal form of a Hopf bifurcation, captures essential properties such as self-sustained oscillations, nonlinear amplification, and compressive responses, and has therefore been widely used to model active hair-cell dynamics and cochlear amplification.In this study, we analytically demonstrate that the local dynamics of the transmission-line model undergo a Hopf bifurcation and can be reduced to the Hopf normal form. We further show that this reduced oscillator representation near the bifurcation can describe the local behavior. To illustrate this correspondence, a numerical framework is used to compare basilar membrane displacement with an ensemble of coupled SLOs, revealing close agreement between both representations.