Abstract
Most of our knowledge of masking is derived from experiments that used one continuous sound to mask another continuous sound. In practical situations, however, masking noises are often intermittent. The present experiments were designed to explore the effect of interruptions upon the masking effectiveness of random noise. In the first experiment, tones were masked by continuous and by interrupted noise. The noise intensity, the proportion of the time the interrupted noise was on, and the rate of interruption were varied. The principal effect of interruption is to lower the masking effectiveness. The extent to which the masking is decreased depends principally upon the duration of the silent interval and secondarily upon the frequency of the masked tone and the intensity of the noise. A computational scheme is possible which will permit a rough approximation of the masked threshold in the presence of interrupted noise. In a second experiment, articulation tests were conducted to determine the effect of interrupted noise upon the intelligibility of speech. The results of this second experiment can be predicted on the basis of the data obtained for pure tones.
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