The coding of the fine temporal details of auditory stimuli by the auditory system is required for many auditory tasks, two renowned examples being pitch perception and sound source localization. The first stage where temporal information is processed is the auditory periphery. Inside the periphery, the Ribbon Synapse (RS) of inner hair cells excels for its temporal acuity, a fact that has driven many recent physiological and computational studies. We present a biophysical model of the auditory RS, which contains many anatomical details obtained from experimental data available in the literature, and is able to reproduce known features of the RS, namely, temporal adaptation of exocytosis due to vesicular depletion and gradual increment of exocytic rate in response to depolarization. We used the model to study some aspects that are difficult to tackle experimentally, in particular, the influence of a vesicular fusion step on: (a) the formation of a “ring-like” spatial pattern of exocytosis, compatible with...