Evaluation of a physiological ear model for the simulation of nonlinear masking effects

Abstract

A physiological model of the human auditory system with the aim at generating masked thresholds for arbitrary sound signals was presented at the previous DEGA meeting. The main parts of the ear model are an active nonlinear cochlear model and a threshold detector which evaluates changes in specific loudness. It was shown that the ear model is able to rebuild the level dependency of spectral and temporal masking patterns, the asymmetry of masking between noise and tone, and the different detection thresholds for amplitude and frequency modulation. This study presents new simulation results for nonlinear masking effects. These results indicate that the nonlinear ear model allows demonstration of other nonlinear psychoacoustical effects such as the additivity of masking, suppression, and distortion product detection. Since the physiological ear model represents a unified approach covering the most important masking effects of arbitrary sounds, it is suitable for applications such as perceptual audio coding. An improved coding efficiency is expected due to the more accurate masked thresholds generated by the ear model in comparison to results from psychoacoustical models commonly used in audio coding which neglect many of the nonlinear effects of auditory perception. [Work supported by DFG.]