Using a stroboscopic imaging system developed in MIT Professor Dennis Freeman's lab, Freeman's team obtained this video of wave motion along the ear's tectorial membrane (at top, the actual video showing nanometer-scale displacements, and at bottom, the same video, motion magnified (Liu et al., 2005) to make the motion more apparent).

Credit: Ghaffari, Aranyosi, and Freeman, MIT

More: MIT finds new hearing mechanism