Some work on hearing at Goettingen

Abstract

The audibility of short tone pulses (5–10 ms) in a periodic masker (typical period 20 ms) depends critically on the presence of well‐formed gaps in the envelope of the masker. Furthermore, for best detection, these temporal gaps in the masker must be constant in shape for a long time (>100 ms) both before and after the tone pulse. This suggests that higher centers in the auditory pathway are able to detect and store long‐time patterns in the masker envelope against which they can test the presence of a test tone. In another study, detection thresholds of tones in chirped maskers were found to vary sensitively with the direction of the chirp (“up” or “down”). Up‐chirps whose “delay distortion” is opposite to that of the basilar membrane were found to lead to 20‐dB lower thresholds than identical down‐chirps. In binaural masking experiments we investigated the question of how fast the ear can switch binaural processing strategies and whether the binaural system can process different binaural configurations ...