Corpus: Middle ear muscle

There are two small muscles in the middle ear called middle ear muscles. They include:

• Musculus stapedius (stapes muscle, stapedius muscle)
• Musculus tensor tympani (eardrum tensioner)

The middle ear muscles are arranged in the tympanic cavity in such a way that they can specifically manipulate the movements of the eardrum and the ossicles. This gives them the ability to adapt sound conduction in the middle ear to the sound stimuli that occur. Their main tasks can be summarised as follows:

• They protect the inner ear from damage caused by excessively loud sound and increase its working range.
• They dampen the oscillation processes in the sound conduction system. The auditory ossicles and eardrum are "slowed down", so to speak, instead of swinging out. This avoids overlapping effects and increases the acoustic information flow for sound stimuli with rapid frequency changes (e.g. speech).