Some Determinants of Interaural Phase Effects

Abstract

It has recently been shown that the binaural threshold for a pure tone presented against a background of noise depends upon the interaural phase differences of the tone and the noise. For example, the threshold of a low frequency tone, in phase at the two ears, is low when it is heard against noise that is out of phase at the two ears, but is high when it is heard against noise that is in phase. The masked threshold of a 250-cycle tone presented against a background of intense noise is in fact about 15 db lower under antiphasic conditions than it is under homophasic conditions. (Homophasic refers to the condition in which the tone and the noise have the same interaural phase difference. Antiphasic refers to the condition in which either tone or noise, but not both, is out of phase at the two ears.) When the tone is masked by another tone, fairly close in frequency but not so close that beats are detected, the dependence of masking on interaural phase does not appear. The present experiment attempts to determine what characteristics masking sound (“masker”) must have if it is to produce interaural phase effects. A 250-cycle tone was presented against four different kinds of background. The masking sounds were (1) pure tones, (2) regular pulses (125 p.p.s.), (3) random pulses (average 125 p.p.s.) and (4) random noise. Combinations of filters permitted the presentation of these maskers in frequency bands that were varied in width and center frequency. The results indicate that the threshold for the tone in the presence of a regular, periodic masker does not depend to any significant degree upon interaural phase relations. A necessary characteristic of the masker that produces interaural phase effects is randomness or irregularity. Both masking and the interaural phase effects increase as the frequency band of a random masker approaches the frequency of the tone. Band width alone does not contribute to the interaural phase effects except as widening a band tends to bring one cut-off nearer the frequency of the tone. Wide and narrow band maskers, both of which contain the frequency of the tone, produce the same effects.