Masking by tone bursts of changing frequency

Abstract

AbstractMost of the common sounds in our daily life change their frequencies transiently, and it is important in engineering applications such as voice recognition and instrument tone discrimination to find a correspondence between the physical properties of these sounds of changing frequency and human perception. This paper reports on the experimental study of masking by tone bursts of changing frequency as an effort toward clarifying such dynamic auditory perception. First, using artificial formant stimuli the masking patterns for continuous tones were measured with the formant frequency changed discontinuously. The results showed masking overshoot at the formant transition and forward and backward masking phenomena, which suggests a characteristic extraction of the voice formant transition in the auditory system. Next, using various combinations of artificial formant and “bridge” tones as the masker, the masking patterns for continuous tones mixed with the masker at various phases were measured. As a result it became clear that the resultant pattern is not a simple addition of individual maskings by the component tones and shows relatively sharp bandpass filter characteristics in the critical band of the auditory system. This suggests the existence of a special processing mechanism for compound consonants in the auditory system.