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Oscillations, Waves, and Interactions - GWDG

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Specific signal types in hearing research 51<br />

Figure 8. Illustration of the low-noise noise generation. The top panel shows a lownoise<br />

noise with a b<strong>and</strong>width of 100 Hz after 10 iterations, the lower panel shows the same<br />

waveform after peripheral filtering with a gamma-tone filter of 78-Hz width.<br />

This purely intensity-based account of masking does not provide insights into the<br />

reasons for observing quite different masked thresholds when narrow-b<strong>and</strong> noises or<br />

sinusoidal signals with the same overall level are used as a masker. When the b<strong>and</strong>width<br />

of the noise is smaller than the critical b<strong>and</strong>width, there is no difference in the<br />

masker intensity within that critical b<strong>and</strong> <strong>and</strong>, if overall masker intensity determines<br />

masking, thresholds should be the same. Typically, however, thresholds for tonal<br />

maskers are about 20 dB lower than for narrowb<strong>and</strong> Gaussian noise maskers [33].<br />

One of the factors that is believed to contribute to the different masking strength<br />

of these signals is the difference in the inherent envelope fluctuations. A tonal masker<br />

has no inherent envelope fluctuations, <strong>and</strong> the addition of the target tone will introduce<br />

a beating pattern which may be an effective cue for detecting the presence of<br />

the target. In a noise masker, however, the masker itself already has a high degree<br />

of fluctuation. Addition of the sinusoidal signal does not alter the properties of the<br />

envelope fluctuations by a significant degree <strong>and</strong> therefore, changes in the temporal<br />

envelope pattern may be a less salient cue for a noise masker.<br />

Low-noise noise maskers provide an elegant stimulus to verify that the inherent<br />

fluctuations in Gaussian noise are an important factor contributing to its strong<br />

masking effect. Such an experiment had been done by Hartmann <strong>and</strong> Pumplin [30],<br />

but the difference that they found was only 5 dB. This difference is considerably<br />

smaller than the 20-dB difference in masking found for Gaussian noise maskers <strong>and</strong><br />

tonal signals. A complicating factor may be that the inherent fluctuations in the

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